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Tuesday, April 20, 2010
'A fabric of tawdry, mass-produced dreams'
Six years later, his other masterpiece, The Day of the Locust, met with critical misapprehension and reader indifference. The American public and even the Popular Front-fixated intelligentsia were in no mood to be told that the common man was a sullen and disappointed entity ripe for violence and proto-fascism, and American culture a fabric of tawdry, mass-produced dreams.
How like today! That's why I'm working on a novel with some of the same themes, though nothing to do with Hollywood.
(That reference to the "Popular Front" stopped me, and I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It's still ambiguous as to what the writer is referring to, but I'd guess it was either or both "the alliance of political parties in France aimed at resisting Fascism" and Stalin's "policy of forming broad alliances with almost any political party willing to oppose the Fascists.")
technorati: Hollywood, Nathanael West, Day of the Locust Labels: 1939, American dream, books, Hollywood, writers
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again
From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.
That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"? technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism Labels: Bad Behavior, books, fakes, publishing, writers
Monday, March 01, 2010
Today's fake: author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims
A recently released book, Last Train from Hiroshima, is so filled with inaccuracies and apparently made-up quotations, sources and facts that publisher Henry Holt is recalling the book, thousands of which are already in book stores.
There are many versions of this story around the web today, but the most complete and damning is the one on MobyLives, the website of publisher Melville House. In addition to the accusations against the Hiroshima book -- including a complete fabrication about how the pilot of the Enola Gay regretted his actions, which he never did -- the entry includes doubts about the author that arose in previous projects. The author, Charles Pellegrino, falsely (and transparently so) claimed to have invented the submersible robot that discovered the Titanic (he didn't), to have thought up the idea behind Jurrasic Park (not) and to have discovered the tomb of Jesus (no experts believe those claims, which are "nonsense" according to the Israeli Antiquities Authority). Finally, he gave himself a PhD from a New Zealand university which says it never granted him a degree.
A week ago Pellegrino had admitted to some of the errors in the Hiroshima book, but said he had been duped. The publisher at that time planned to correct later editions.
The MobyLives entry quotes a 2000 NYT review of the Titanic book which demands, "He shouldn't get away with it." Apparently he rather has, getting book contract after contract, until now. technorati: books, hoaxes Labels: books, fakes, hoaxes
Sunday, December 13, 2009
A friend reviews my novel How They Scored
My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED. An excerpt: After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires. Wow, thanks Lisa!Labels: books, heterosexuality, maleness, pornography
Saturday, December 12, 2009
An understandable confusion
He was gradually, I wouldn't say losing his mind, but he would get confused about things. I remember when my daughter was born, he would refer to her as a book. And he would refer to his latest book as a child. He really had things turned around.
Screenwriter Robert Towne on novelist John Fante
in an interview in Stop Smiling magazine, no. 32 technorati: Robert Towne, John Fante, writers Labels: Beat writers, books, writers
Friday, November 06, 2009
How They Scored now available on Amazon.com
My novel How They Scored is now available on Amazon.com as both a paperback ($16.98, available for free shipping) and Kindle edition ($3.99), though the latter has a strange notation that it is "not available for customers in the United States" / Update 9 Nov 09: The Kindle edition is now fully available.Labels: books, How They Scored
Thursday, November 05, 2009
The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states
The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.
A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?technorati: travel books, books, youth Labels: books, short stories, travel
Monday, September 28, 2009
Too much talk
I looked at "The Savage Detectives" again briefly on Sunday, having bought a paperback copy of the novel to accompany my now-damaged hardback copy. As far as I could determine, there are no direct quotes in the entire second section, which takes 80% of the book.
Some of the chapters in the current novel I'm writing, titled "Knock Yourself Out," are written like this, and they're my favorite chapters. You know what the great thing is about forbidding direct quotes? It eliminates the long talky sections that mar my writing. Anytime I have an extended dialogue scene, it tends to get away from me. I can hear the dialogue and individual lines are good, but when there's three or four pages of talking, of clever dialogue, everything gets lost. For example, in the chapter I just finished, a scene at a party devolves into three pages of dialog, with a descriptive paragraph every ten lines or so.
It's a mode of writing that's always easy to do and dull to read. The first novel I ever attempted, which I titled "Us and Them," had pages and pages of this talk. I had seen it done in other books and it didn't seem to grate, so I thought it was permissible to do. But it just doesn't fit with the kind of book I want to write now.
When I wrote "How They Scored," I was able to alternate between direct and indirect quotes. I would have a long passage of narration, with indirect quotes if necessary, and then a paragraph or two of direct quotation, and then go back to indirect quoting -- all in the same scene in which one character was telling a single, long anecdote. It worked pretty well, I thought. I haven't been able to achieve this yet with my current project, though as I say, the chapters where I have no direct quotations at all are fine.. technorati: writing Labels: Bolaņo, books, fiction, How They Scored, Knock Yourself Out, writing techniques
Friday, September 25, 2009
Something else to blame on the internet
Blame it partially on the fact that "2666" takes weeks to get through, seeing as I have a full time job and a lot of other stuff to do, but still, I feel like a bit of a slacker for having read only that tome (and I'm still not quite finished with it) and one other from the list of the 25 best novels of the decade, as decided by a Millions poll of professional writers, lit teachers and critics. And of the civilian readers' favorites, I've read only one other. But I do have a few dozen books on my shelves which I've been meaning to get to, and the sad thing is that none of the other books on the Millions' list are among them. Either my taste is "eclectic," or I just haven't been paying attention to reviews -- even though reviews and news about books are one of the things taking up time that I would ordinarily spend actually reading books.
I blame the internet.technorati: books, reading Labels: books, reading
Monday, September 21, 2009
More on my new book 'How They Scored'
See that thing on the right that looks like an ad? It's my ad! It's about my new book. Click it! You'll end up on the website I created for the book.
Q. What's with the highway picture?
A. The whole first half of the book is a road novel. Of course the picture is from a highway near El Paso, Texas, and the journey in the book is from San Francisco to a mountain in north-central Washington state. But the pass pictured in the photo captures a nice road-novel feeling. I actually created a new cover for the book based on the same picture. If you click through to the Lulu page selling the book, you'll see the cover. Totally different from the softball team cover. Collect 'em all.
Q. You mean it's not about softball?
A. No, although at one point the characters do play catch, although "catch with deadly consequences."Labels: books, How They Scored
Monday, September 14, 2009
Buy my new book
 You can now buy my novel How They Scored, a book about Silicon Valley, sex, privacy and the internet, and real estate in San Francisco.
This is the book I wrote in 2007 for my erstwhile publisher Cleis Press. We disagreed about the final form of the book and it wound up back in my hands. It's now available as a paperback, for $17.75, or as a download for $4.
Get it, it's funny, sexy, and au courant.Labels: books, novel writing, sex, zeitgeist
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Newly available: Lesbian Camp Girls
 For a long time I've had a broken link to the porn book I wrote under a pseudonym, "Lesbian Camp Girls." First published on the Lulu POD site by my friend Marilyn Jaye Lewis as part of her work with the Erotic Authors Association, the book was unavailable for a long time, more because of my laziness than anything else. But now you can order it as a book or as a PDF download (the latter only a buck fifty). It's 135 pages of jaw-dropping, shocking porno, and of course should be read by ADULTS ONLY. Really. It's books like this that make people draw distinctions between erotica and porn, and this is the latter.
It's also really funny, I think. I wrote it partly as an homage to the silly, nasty paperback porn of the late 1970s, the kind of stuff with self-descriptive titles like "Dog Loving Lesbians" and "Her Horny Cousins." But I also wrote it to measure up (or down) to that material. So be warned (or intrigued). technorati: porn, summer, lesbian porn Labels: books, porn, pornography, sex
Thursday, August 13, 2009
What makes a postmodern novel
Courtesy The Rumpus, I found a link to an entry on the LA Times books blog listing 61 "essential" postmodern novels. I was more amused by the alleged common attributes of a postmodern novel, as defined by the author -- LA Times books columnist and reviewer Carolyn Kellogg -- than by the list itself (of which I have read 12 of the 61 books). The list of common attributes: - author is a character
- self-contradicting plot
- disrupts/plays with form
- comments on its own bookishness
- plays with language
- includes fictional artifacts, such as letters
- blurs reality and fiction
- includes historical falsehoods
- overtly references other fictional works
- more than 1000 pages
- less than 200 pages
- postmodern progenitor
To that list of attributes, I would add "refers to pop culture ironically, i.e. in such a way as to both embrace it and distance itself from it." technorati: books, postmodernism Labels: art, books, irony, novelists, postmodernism
Bolaño all the time
On The Rumpus, I posted: The limits of narrative It's a short bit, not even an essay, for the pretentious title; it could have been expanded into a much longer piece. But I didn't have time and just wrote it over the course of a couple hours while multi-tasking on other things.
If it seems like all I can blog about lately is Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author, it's because 1) Nothing much is happening in my life to write about, except 2) I'm very excited by this author's work. I feel evangelistic, like the way I did when I started doing Zen meditation. Everyone should read this author's books, etc. I know it's tiresome. Still, I liked my post. I worked "The Sopranos" in too, if that helps. technorati: Bolaño, books Labels: Bolaņo, books
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Natasha Wimmer links
Having read (twice!) Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives" and having just started on his final book, the monumental "2666," I wanted to post several links having to do with both books and their translator, Natasha Wimmer:technorati: Natasha Wimmer, Bolaño, translation Labels: Bolaņo, books, translation, Wimmer
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
NYRB reprints Handke classic 'Short Letter, Long Farewell'
Browsing on the New York Review website, I was pleased to see that they have reprinted Peter Handke's classic road novel Short Letter, Long Farewell.
 This 1972 book -- which became widely available to American readers in the 1985 Avon release (seen at left) of three Handke novels in one paperback volume entitled Three by Peter Handke -- is about the aftermath of a breakup, as the male narrator flees what seems to be a quest for revenge by his erstwhile lover (or wife, it's unclear). This was one of my favorite books when I was in my late 20s; it combines the outlines of a chase thriller with slow conversations about books and films, including a conversation with the director John Ford. I gave a hardback edition of the novel to a friend, who then wrote about it.
Handke became a pariah in the 1990s when he wrote a book defending the claims of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, and in 2006 outraged people when he spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. He remains a figure of great controversy. But there was no hint of this moral defection -- which I blame on his simply being an Austrian, because it seems all Austrians are perverse and nihilistic -- in the 70s, when he worked closely with German director Wim Wenders, who filmed his novels "Wrong Movement" and "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" and several Handke screenplays, most famously "Wings of Desire." technorati: books, NYRB Labels: Austria, books, Handke, novelists
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
New book by a friend
Several years ago I was a technical publications manager at a different software company than the one I work for now. One of the brightest writers there was a young guy everyone called Andy, whose work experience included working in a toy factory. Since then he's gone on to a creative writing MFA and now, known officially as Andrew Zornoza, is the proud author of a first novel, Where I Stay. The book's unusual design reflects the novel's unusual structure, a succession of prose snapshots of various locales, mostly around the American west. It's an intriguing book and worth picking up.
See the review on HTML Giant. technorati: books Labels: books, books by friends, novelists
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Crank of the day
The novelist and short story writer Ray Bradbury, now 89, is the subject of a New York Times profile because of his campaign on behalf of his local library. "Libraries raised me," he says.
But on the subject of the internet and e-books, Bradbury turns up the cranky old man: Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." While I admire the spunk, and acknowledge the author's right to control the distribution of his work, I wonder who he thinks has been reading his work for the last ten or twenty years. The same people who are crazy about the internet. And once a decent digital device is arrived at, Bradbury's books will be on it, along with everyone else's.technorati: Ray Bradbury Labels: books, the internets, writers
Monday, April 13, 2009
Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment
A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.
Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was. technorati: amazonfail, books Labels: amazon, amazonfail, books, bookselling, publishing
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books
Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.
Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.
Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."
People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books Labels: amazon, amazonfail, books, bookselling, gays, publishing
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
More celebrity memoirs the solution to publishing's problems
She says she wants to flog "celebrity-driven" books, bringing in "'really smart' writers to help shape those public figures' lives into books." As for the literary part of being a literary agent: I'm trying not to do too much literary stuff -- which is not to say I'm not taking smart things, but there's a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I'd spent most of my career trying to write away from... I want to represent books that will actually reach people. Like celebrity memoirs. More at my Open Salon blogtechnorati: books, writers, publishing Labels: books, novel writing, publishing, writers
Friday, January 23, 2009
Interview with Yiyun Li -- the personal and political
 Yesterday I interviewed author Yiyun Li, whose new novel The Vagrants is the best literary novel I've read in a long time. Get used to me mentioning it, because it's one of those books you feel everyone who appreciates great writing should read.
One of the questions I addressed in the interview has to do with her intention in depicting the lives of people living in a provincial Chinese town in 1979, a few years after the close of the Cultural Revolution. She depicts those lives as very grim, filled with brutality and violence. Some of the details on the smaller scale strike one as particularly heartless, as when she talks about a family where the parents, disappointed after having six female children, don't even bother to give names to the youngest three, who are referred to as Little Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. Other details, about the way the government treats political prisoners, are violent in a more physical way -- for example, they stage a "denunciation ceremony" for a political prisoner, and cut her vocal cords before the rally so she can't shout any counter-revolutionary slogans in front of a crowd.
Given this cruel picture, I asked the author if she intended the book to be an indictment of Chinese society, and she answered very forcefully: I don't have any intention for the novel to be an indictment of anything. That is a big NO. NO. NO. The situation may seem Chinese and specific to this era, but if you look at history, horrible things happen all the time. Brutality and violence happen all the time. On all scales. I can't shy away from that if I am writing a book.... My story happens to be set in China, and the characters happen to be Chinese. But if you read, say, Toni Morrison's novels, would you say she is depicting an unfairly negative picture of America? I replied, "Certainly negative, but I would not say unfairly so." But there's more to say. Most Americans are secure enough in their views of their country that they don't object to negative, yet fair, criticism. I don't think China is yet secure enough in its reputation to feel the same way. You'll remember how sensitive they were last year to criticism of their human rights record, and how they took pains to ensure that the picture of China -- during the Olympics, at least -- was a positive one.
Regardless of her intention, I wouldn't be surprised if some people see Li's book as an indictment of Chinese society. But she went on to say: I think that is a very narrow way of looking at literature... a very soviet, socialist view of how literature should represent certain things. I feel that as a writer the only people I feel responsible to are my characters. And I would need to treat them very fairly. Of course, that's the right approach for any artist to take. But what strikes me is that, as far as the content of her book is concerned, she feels her first allegiance is not to either the country of her birth or her adopted one -- one she had to struggle to stay in, as I mentioned yesterday -- but to her book's characters.
I admire that very much, and I found much else to admire in the book itself, as I state in the interview. technorati: writers, Yiyun Li, China Labels: books, narrative, novel writing, novelists, writers
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thursday
Today I interviewed author Yiyun Li, whose new novel The Vagrants I just finished reading, and can't say enough good things about. It'll take me a little bit to edit and post the interview, but in the meantime you can read a short profile of the Oakland writer, or read this 2005 Washington Post article about her struggle, ultimately successful, to stay in this country. technorati: Yiyun Li, books Labels: books, writers
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Eight years' work on her book paid off
On the SF Metroblog, I just posted an interview with novelist Nami Mun, whose work I was alerted to through the blog of another Korean-American writer, Alex Chee.
I hadn't heard of Mun, but she is a Pushcart Prize winner. According to the book deals log on Publishers Marketplace, Mun's book sold in a "significant" deal, which is between $250K and $500K, but she did work on it for eight years. Say she got $250K for the book, that's about $30,000 a year.
Her multi-city book tour has just started, and I hope it goes better than that other guy's. technorati: writers, book deals, Nami Mun Labels: book deals, books, publishing, writers
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Friends' sites, links and projects
San Francisco author Michelle Richmond had a reader so entranced with her novel The Year of Fog that he took a Flickr photo set of the places and things mentioned in the book. The novel is being developed for the screen by Newmarket Films.
Stephen Elliott and some other folks have a new online magazine, The Rumpus, and they're having a benefit reading on Jan. 14.Labels: books, magazines, writers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Immature content only
On Friday I mentioned the CNet editor who self-published his novel and then wrote a long column about doing so. Now it seems (courtesy Galleycat) Apple won't allow his book to be sold as an e-book for the iPhone because of a single line in which "a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to '(love) me like you mean it,' just with a slightly more emphatic verb." The story goes on to speculate just how this phrase came to the attention of Apple, quoting a developer: "What would happen if I (a Romanian) would publish an e-book filled with Romanian obscenities? -- would Apple's staff need to learn Romanian... and read the entire ebook ... to make sure this doesn't happen?"
But the part of the story that caught my attention was lower down, in a section recounting Apple's struggle to keep iPhone apps SFW: Apple's definition of "objectionable" has been questioned before. After initially balking, Apple finally relented to the extremely influential fart joke lobby last week and permitted applications such as Pull My Finger and iFart Mobile (ranked 3rd and 10th, respectively, among paid App Store applications at the moment) under what was described as a "Mature" section. Really? Sounds like apps with names like that should be in an "Immature" section. technorati: books, Apple, censorship Labels: books, novelists, pornography, publishing
It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- holiday feeling edition
A guy who was on the plane that crashed in Denver on Saturday sent Twitter messages about the experience, beginning with "Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!" (sic) After being taken back to the airport terminal, he wrote that passengers were being held in the airline's lounge but weren't given drinks. "You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can't even get a vodka-tonic," he complained: "boo." His username? 2drinksbehind.
The CEO of Fry's, a West Coast electronics retailer, is being accused of scamming $65 million from the company in kickbacks from suppliers.
Today's fake: The New York Times apologized yesterday after publishing a fake letter to the editor purporting to be from the mayor of Paris.
Today's hoax: Publisher Jane Daniel is now speaking openly about having published a years-long hoax in which author Mischa Defonseca claimed to have survived the Holocaust as a child by living with wolves in a forest. Daniel is speaking openly, that is, because she has just published her own book about her role in the hoax. See my previous entry on the hoax.
In Colorado Springs, this headline says it all: Man Found Outside With Pants Down May Lose Legs.Labels: Bad Behavior, books, Colorado Springs, fakes, hoaxes
Friday, December 19, 2008
Two articles about the state of publishing
Two articles/blog postings caught my eye today.
Courtesy Galleycat, a long, almost obsessively comprehensive article by a CNet editor about self-publishing his novel. He compares services, makes strategy suggestions, and comes to the conclusion that you have to spend the money a real publisher would have spent on your book if you want it to be good at all. But at least it's published then.
Then in Huffington Post, someone writes about the publishing industry's seeming disinterest in publishing books male readers would want to read.
Since the novel I wrote for a local small press was designed specifically for the male market, but turned down by the publisher and dumped back in my lap for a small kill fee with the restriction that I can only self-publish it, these two articles coincide with my own writing career, such as it is at the moment.
That's right -- the novel I signed a contract for in 2007 and wrote in six months, more or less to order, was rejected, and I'll wind up self-publishing it. I'll be sure to publicize it here, once I go through many of the steps outlined by that self-publishing article (but without spending all that money on the book). technorati: books, publishing, self-publishing, reading Labels: books, publishing, reading
Thursday, November 20, 2008
A very nice mention
Thanks to Alexis McKinnis, the sex columnist for the Twin Cities' vita.mn, for today's very complimentary mention of my book How I Adore You. In answer to someone asking for pointers on learning something about power play, she writes: If you need some inspiration, pick up a copy of Mark Pritchard's "How I Adore You." It's a collection of erotic short stories that mostly focuses on different degrees of BDSM. The first story, "Pretend," is so tastefully salacious that you won't need much more to inspire you, though you probably won't want to put the book down until you hit the back cover. I'm a fan of Alexis' writing too, and I hope she writes a book someday soon so I can return the favor. technorati: Alexis McKinnis, sex columnists, Labels: Alexis, books, sex
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Blue and beige seemingly ruled book design this year
That's a screen capture from a Galleycat posting about the upcoming National Books Awards; it depicts the five finalists in fiction and non-fiction. Go to the post and you'll see the nominees in the other two categories, poetry and Young People's Literature. Has anybody pointed out that, including the five poetry books (not pictured above), just about all the book covers use only two colors, blue and beige? The poetry books have a little bit of pale yellow and (daring!) on one, a panel colored a subdued orange. What is up with that??
technorati: book design Labels: awards, book design, books
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Pessoa in the NYT
A few weeks ago I started reading a remarkable book, "The Book of Disquiet" by a Portugese writer, Fernando Pessoa. It's a collection of very short pieces -- almost like journal entries -- written from a fictionalized point of view. The perspective is almost zen-like (in fact, I bought a copy of the book for a friend who practices Zen meditation) in the narrator's quality of observation and his perception of nothingness at the core of existence. But it's not correct to speak of the book's "narrator," since the author's intent was not to write a novel or even a fictionalized diary, but to filter his own perceptions through layers of personas.
Today in the New York Times there's an article about Pessoa, whom I had never heard of before a month ago. In fact, I can't remember how I heard of this book. But it's really, really great. I was happy to see that its star shot in the NYT today resulted in a big spike in sales on Amazon.com, where it's number 4016 at this moment. technorati: Fernando Pessoa Labels: books, reading, writers
Friday, February 29, 2008
Today's hoax: author says 'I felt Jewish'
A woman who several years ago insisted that her 1997 memoir "Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years" was true has admitted that the whole story, in which she depicts herself as a Jewish child who wanders by herself across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her deported parents, is a hoax (courtesy Publishers Marketplace). The book is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" -- it seems that according to one passage in the book the author claimed to have been sheltered by wolves.
In a statement, the author said the real story is that while she is a Belgian Catholic, her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."
Apart from the preposterous notion of a small child being taken in by a wolf pack, rather than devoured for lunch, the notion of a child being protected from the Nazis in this manner seems very strange even as a fictional trope, as wolves were a symbol favored by the Nazis themselves.
Coincidentally, I saw part of "Dr. Zhivago" on TV last night, and as we watched the scene where Zhivago and Lara are marooned in a snowy dacha surrounded by howling wolves, Cris murmured, "The wolves symbolize the Bolsheviks." That never occurred to me, but I realized she was right. I'm terrible at symbols, they go right by me -- somewhat of a handicap for a novelist. technorati: literary hoaxes, holocaust, novels, French cinema Labels: Bad Behavior, books, hoaxes, writers
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Two new novels set in Las Vegas
Two new novels are set in, and largely about, Las Vegas: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr., and Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Both are first novels.
The story of how the first one was published has some interesting and -- for writers -- comic bits: When McGinniss was looking for people to give his manuscript a read, among the first people he contacted was (Bret Easton) Ellis. "I groaned," says Ellis of receiving McGinniss' first e-mail asking for help. "Of course, you have to understand, I feel completely indebted to his father. There was no way I was going to say no to his request."
Ellis sent McGinniss back to the drawing board. "It needed to be tightened up," he says. "I felt there were a lot of missed opportunities... There was a lot of editorializing. He had the same setting [of the published novel], the same cast of characters, the same complicated relationships, but the story needed to be more precise."
"I was very naive," McGinniss says. "I'd just assumed you crank it out and if it reads well, it's a novel -- it's done, you're set. At the time I sent it to him, inside I thought, I think I'm pretty close." For the next two years he made multiple revisions and did some more Vegas research... The confusing thing for novelists at the beginning of their careers is that you're aware some people do get manuscripts published without extensive, multiple revisions; while they may not "crank it out," they basically lay it down, do some polishing, and they really are done. T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of these; I heard him interviewed on a local radio station while I was writing my own first novel, Make Nice (which also happens to be set partly in Las Vegas). I phoned up the show and asked the author about his revision process. He said: This is going to drive a lot of people crazy, but I don't do any subsequent drafts. I do substantial rewriting as I go along in the first draft, and when I get to the end of the book, it's essentially done. Of course there's editing and so on, but what's in my computer is basically it. Many more writers do the multiple-revisions thing. My friend Katia went through seven or eight drafts of her first novel Crashing America and she's into the fourth or fifth draft of her next book. Soon I'll be commencing the fourth draft of Bangalored, my second book -- though like McGinniss Jr. when I sent it to my agent last year I thought, It's pretty close. technorati: Las Vegas, books, novels Labels: book deals, books, Las Vegas, novel writing, novelists
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The short version of length
Here's a hilarious summary of Neil Strauss' book The Game from a writer at the Guardian in the U.K., where it was published as The Rules of the Game. Don't worry about being a total loser. If women only went to bed with successful, attractive men, most of them would never get laid. Women want to be fooled into thinking you're not a jerk, every bit as much as you need them to believe it. This is the book my orthopedic surgeon was discussing with the OR nurses as he probed my spine with a large needle a couple years ago. I'm sure the advice is just as current then as now. technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER Labels: books
Friday, October 12, 2007
What novels are about these days
I have a certain fascination with plot summaries and what they show about the presumed subjects that people want to read about -- presumed by publishers, that is. Here is a list of plot summaries from the New York Times bestseller list, with titles, authors and publishers removed. A Colombian poet's love for a woman is tested. A young man -- and an elephant -- save a Depression-era circus. An Afghan-American returns to Kabul to learn how a childhood friend has fared under the Taliban. An epic story about three generations of Greek-Americans, told by a hermaphrodite. A doctor's decision to secretly send his newborn daughter, who has Down syndrome, to an institution haunts everyone involved. Privileged 30-somethings try to make their way in literary New York just before 9/11. A rift in an Amish community threatens to keep a courting couple apart. A Spanish shepherd boy travels to Egypt in search of treasure. A father and son travel in post-apocalypse America. Politics and treachery in the court of Henry VIII. The lives of two women in 19th-century China. An unlikely romance between a soldier and an idealistic young woman is tested in the aftermath of 9/11. A girl sues her parents after learning they want her to donate a kidney to her sibling. An Amish teenager goes on trial, accused of having a baby, then smothering it to death. A team is dispatched to investigate the wreckage of a Soviet bomber that crashed 50 years ago, loaded with weaponized anthrax. Romance blooms between a widower and a woman who's been teaching his brother, who has Down syndrome, to live independently. The story, set mainly in northern India, of characters united by the legacy of colonialism. A cafe manager falls for a Cary Grant-like charmer, then learns he has an 11-year-old daughter. An American third-string quarterback joins the Italian National Football League's Parma Panthers. How the choices made by a North Carolina man and the neighbor with whom he falls in love play out in their lives Virgil Flowers investigates three murders in a small Minnesota town. A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war. An aspiring photographer working as a nanny has terrible visions. The entangled lives of an upstate New York couple and their best friend. Two young black men, adopted in childhood by the former mayor of Boston, encounter their birth mother and sister Stone Barrington, the New York cop turned lawyer, tracks a rogue C.I.A. agent on a Caribbean island. The dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden seeks vengeance against the orcs. Someone is out to destroy a young chef's New market restaurant, poisoning food and setting off a bomb. A woman finds a skull in her garden, while in the 1830s, a medical student tracks a killer. Nathan Zuckerman grapples with aging and desire. In Lake Wobegon, a daughter learns about her mother's secret life. Two sisters overcome their differences and claim their heritage when one returns to their North Carolina home. Another Christmas story featuring the angels Shirley, Goodness and Mercy.
Note several themes: - A large dose of wonderfulness, some of it seen in magical realism, some of it in mere exoticism.
- A fascination with Asia.
- Two different stories about Amish characters; I can tell you they're by different authors.
- Several stories emphasizing the vulnerability of babies.
technorati: books, novels, plots Labels: books, novel writing
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
It came to the end sooner than expected
National Book Award nominees were announced today:
Fiction
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)
Nonfiction
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)
When I was in a Barnes and Noble last week I saw And Then We Came to the End on the remainders table. That's pretty bad if your novel is remaindered even before it gets a chance to be nominated for the National Book Award.
technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER Labels: books
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Borders shops for new authors among staff
This Galleycat post says Borders is holding a contest for the best manuscript(s) written by its 30,000 employees, "anticipating multiple winners and hop[ing] to publish fictional works ranging from mysteries and thrillers to romance and historical novels" in its house imprint.
I'm sure they'll find some winners. But if I were one of them, I sure would make sure a qualified agent or lawyer looked at the contract being offered. What are the chances it will contain unusually explotative terms -- and that employees might feel too intimidated to object? technorati: publishing, bookstores Labels: books, publishing
Monday, March 26, 2007
Quiet days
I don't have much to say to the world lately. Did you want to know I went to the dentist, or that the cherry tree in our backyard is blooming? That it's raining and I got to stay home this afternoon? I didn't think so.
Almost as uninteresting is what I'm reading: "Catch-22," and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Most people probably assume someone like me read the Chabon book long ago. Sorry, didn't get to it til now. I am so behind. I did manage to read Darcey Steinke's "Suicide Blonde" and most of her latest book "Milk," which is really beautifully written but which is, for some reason, hard for me to stick with.
And I wasted a lot of time over the last couple of months reading bits of stuff I didn't stick with and wasn't that interested in in the first place, including Harold Robbins' "79 Park Avenue," which I picked up mainly for the cover. I just donated it to Community Thrift, though, so if you want to see the cover (very early-60s Pocket Book) you'll have to go down there and snag it.
Finally, in literary news, they're shooting a movie of Richard Yates' fantastic early 60s book "Revolutionary Road," about the co-optation of a high-minded middle-brow young couple who decide to chuck their middle-class life and follow their dream and move to Paris -- but get waylaid along the way. It's a great book and now it is being made into a move with Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, their first pairing since "Titanic."
I don't know why that book isn't as famous as other anti-establishment youth-anthem books of the 60s -- "Little Big Man," "Catch-22," "The Graduate."Labels: books, reading
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