Soft Skull News

As some of you may have read in an earlier post, we're publishing a biography of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the history of Christendom. Consequently, I have his name in my Google News Alerts (the Poor Publisher's Clipping Service). I get about six or seven a day and this morning I got one with two entries: one, from Alternet adapted from a speech of his earlier this year, the other a letter to the editor of the Birmingham News. They speak for themselves.

Giving So It Matters AlterNet - San Francisco,CA,USA

...There's a lot in scripture about leprosy. It was a much-feared disease in Biblical times, and one of the very interesting things about leprosy is it does something to the nerve endings in your hands and feet. Much of the disfigurement that you see in lepers comes from the fact that they can't feel pain in their hands and their feet. So you can put your hand on a red hot stove and it doesn't communicate to your brain that your skin is literally on fire.

I think the reason it's used in scripture so much is that we all want to insulate ourselves from the pain of the world. The trick is to stay connected to the world so that we feel the pain and then to make some kind of response to it.

There are two kinds of giving, but I like to think of it as downstream giving and upstream giving. It's not enough to pull the drowning victims out of the river, you need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in. So there's both downstream-giving that actually takes care of victims of oppression. And then there's upstream-giving -- walking back upstream to do justice and to promote systemic change to find the underlying causes that are causing all this.

The religious right is upstream, throwing people in the river and it's time we named it for what it is. It's time we took the Bible back. It's time we took our faith back and stopped having to apologize for being Christian or Jewish or Muslim without having to explain, "No, we're not that kind of a Jew, we're not that kind of a Christian."

I think right now for gay and lesbian people it's easier to come out to someone as gay than it is to come out as Christian. We have allowed ourselves to be hijacked. Part of what I'm trying to do in my ministry is use my skills and my office to say that there are Christians in this world who feel differently about these issues. It takes religious people to fight back against religious people...

Birmingham News - Birmingham,AL,USA
...I was outraged when Gene Robinson, an admitted homosexual, was ordained as a bishop in New Hampshire a couple years ago. I have never seen my beloved church in the same light since this travesty occurred. It is like there is a dark cloud hanging over the church every time I attend. I have spoken with my priest and continue to pray about this issue on a daily basis. I have received no satisfaction because any way you look at it, according to the Bible, homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of God...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 08:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well here is the first ever streaming video trailer for a Soft Skull book...Nothing earth-shattering in the annals of book publicity, but still, an effort to enter the 21st century.

One interesting aspect of this book, by the way, Surfing Armageddon, by George Tabb, is that he's the second of our authors to be seriously working MySpace, the other being Lisa Crystal Carver. There are many many folks out there with a lot more to say about MySpace than I can say, but it's pretty damn clear to me that in most cases an author with a strong MySpace presence is an author that will make Amazon.com happy. The speed and fluidity of word-of-mouth in that network exceeds any we at Soft Skull have seen.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Just two lovely items, a stunning review of Paul Berman's POWER AND THE IDEALISTS in this week's Washington Post Book World, and a really lovely excerpt Oy Tannenbaum" from the forthcoming HALF/LIFE: JEW-ISH TALES FROM INTERFAITH HOMES (edited by Laurel Snyder, forthcoming 04/2006) in Saturday's New York Times Opinion Pages...

Thought the links are above, here are a couple of nice little excepts, to give you the flava...

Oy Tannenbaum
By KATHARINE WEBER

MY earliest Christmas memory: I am 5 years old, sitting on the bench seat close beside my father in our aqua and white Buick, the one that looked like a saddle shoe, on a mission to get the best Christmas tree we can find.

We drive and we drive, until we are at last in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. We park in front of a corner lot with colored lights strung along the top of the chain-link fence...

The tree man sees us. He has a long black beard and wears a round fur hat, and he is bundled in a big coat that looks as if it has been made from dead animals.

His dark eyes meet mine and I look away, embarrassed, certain that I have already done the wrong thing. I reach up for my father's hand but he is no longer beside me, and I turn to find him, then trot after him, playing my part of the little girl here to select a Christmas tree with her father.

The tree man has a large knife stuck into the leather belt that holds his coat around him, and a moment later I see him use it to slash at the twine binding a tree in order to shake it open for a customer.

"What do you think of this one?" my father asks, standing an enormous tree upright. I shake my head. It's the wrong kind, with long, sharp needles. I like the denser kind of tree that has short needles. People who get those long-needled trees are the same people who decorate with white lights and tinsel but no ornaments, or with no lights but only one kind of ornament, just shiny purple balls all the same size, like a department store...

Talking 'Bout His Generation
The tale of how a Marxist tough became Germany's foreign minister helps explain today's Europe.

Berman's thoughtful book is a valuable history lesson, especially for those too young to remember much about the tumultuous 1960s or '70s. He draws the curtain back on the era of the "New Left," a time when capitalism and American power were considered the chief culprits for the world's woes and when a global peasant revolution seemed not merely possible but something that college students could help spark. But what makes this book more than merely a collection of reminiscences of intellectual arguments from the glory days -- earnest if long-forgotten quarrels that largely unfolded in obscure journals -- is that many of these activists have assumed positions of influence in Europe. Fischer's fellow '68ers include Bernard Kouchner, the French founder of Doctors Without Borders, who became the first international administrator of post-conflict Kosovo, Javier Solana, the former NATO secretary general who now serves as the European Union's foreign policy chief, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the great U.N. diplomat who was murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad in August 2003...

As this is happening, the '68ers are in their twilight. It is a fitting coincidence that just as Power and the Idealists was published, Fischer announced that he would be leaving the new, more conservative German government headed by Angela Merkel. "Young people must write the new chapter," he said. Now this new generation -- defined not by 1968 but by 9/11 and the Iraq War -- must grapple with the arguments that their predecessors could never resolve.

This final paragraph, in some way, represents why Soft Skull Press published this book, given the flak we expected—and got—over publishing a "liberal hawk." We must all write the sequel to the Generation of 1968 and the more we understand about the emergence, development and passing of that generation, the more effectively we will be able to express our own goals.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 05:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For complicated reasons, we weren't able to get word out about this (my fault, not the staff...) so I figured I should blog it... (We publish the Essential Bill Hicks)

This Friday, we are excited to present the BILL HICKS BIRTHDAY PARTY at the Bowery Poetry Club, a tribute to the iconoclastic comedian the late Richard Pryor once called “an inspired and inspiring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary, all at once.”

Featuring Rick Shapiro and a screening of the new Bill Hicks DVD!

Friday, December 16 at 8:00pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (@ Bleecker)
Manhattan
$10

ABOUT BILL HICKS:
In 1993, not long after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, controversial comedian Bill Hicks found his final, scathing appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman abruptly excised at network demand. Months later, at age 33, he was dead.

Hicks could have been on all the chat shows. He could have had his own show on prime time. He could have got rich and fat and frightened. But Hicks didn't go the easy way (give or take the occasional dick joke). He turned down every offer Satan made him. Instead he figured out his best shot at truth and then he said it. He attacked the lies that justified and prettified the carnage of the First Gulf War. He attacked the easy surrender of art to commerce, the demeaning cynicism of the marketing culture and the preposterous power of the mainstream media to confuse and corrupt. In an admiring profile by the New Yorker critic John Lahr — reissued in Lahr’s collection of essays, Light Fantastic, and reproduced in Love All The People — Hicks describes the comic’s vocation as being “the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

“He was a genius. He was one of the five best comics I've ever seen in my life.”—Dennis Miller

“An inspired and inspring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary, all at once.”—Richard Pryor

“Bill Hicks—blowtorch, excavator, truth-sayer, and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built”— Tom Waits

“Savage, brilliant, funny, tremendously intelligent.”—John Cleese

“Bill was right up there with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. He was easily the best comic of my generation.”—Brett Butler

“He was hilarious, brilliant, brave, and right about everything” — Henry Rollins

“That this house notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on February 26th 1994, at the age of 33; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worthy of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.”—Stephen Pound MP; Parliamentary House of Commons

We hope to see you there!

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 01:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was up in Toronto Wednesday and Thursday to tell our Canadian distributor's reps about forthcoming books (an event known as Sales Conference) and to visit some stores and editors. One of my stops was at This Ain't The Rosedale Library, a wonderful Toronto bookseller that is ridiculously supportive of Soft Skull (we have some of our poetry books face out there, for God's sake!)

And there I got the wonderful news that the Guardian has selected the store as one of the Top Ten bookstores in the world. Thrilled for them, I resolve to check the rest when back in New York.

Lo and behold, who do I see on the list but City Lights (natch!) and Clovis in Williamsburg, equally ridiculously supportive of Soft Skull. (The owner, Amanda, saves money by driving to Soft Skull's office to pick up her order...)

As excited as I am to tell you about these stores, part of me also wants to tell you about the other stores in those cities: Modern Times in SF, Pages in Toronto, St. Marks and Bookcourt and Three Lives in NYC...So here's what I say: visit them all, please, if/when buying books this year. The owners and managers of thse stores are all scared shitless right now, relying on holiday sales to get them through another year.

Also, a quick additional observation sparked by this accolade and by the trip to Toronto. This Ain't The Rosedale Library and Pages are both among the top ten independents for Soft Skull in terms of sales, also. Toronto helps keep Soft Skull in business. Thanks, Toronto...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Probably the first blogging author Soft Skull put under contract, Michael Standaert, has just launched yet another blog (he has a rather nice stable in fact.)

But this one, Skipping Towards Armageddon, this is rather closely related to the book he is doing with us, the eponymous Skipping Towards Armageddon

Over the coming weeks, it will encompass all you ever need to know about the man who not only invented the Left Behind series (over 75 million books sold) but invented political Evangelicism—from the Institute for Creation Research back in 1972, to the first Evangelical organization to get involved in electoral politics (Californians for Biblical Morality) to the Moral Majority (Lahaye persuaded Falwell to create it, and served at the organization's first chairman). James Dobson is nothing on LaHaye (and LaHaye's wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women of America), nothing.

The book publishes in Febuary 2006 and you can get a hint of the book from Michael's article in the NthPosition, but we suggest you head over to Michael's blog now to give yourself a crash course on the fundamentalist Right.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 05:48 PM | Permalink

Well each year we get all excited when we discover one or two of our books make one of two "Best of..." lists—we feel like we've cracked some great glass ceiling of indifference.

This year, however, thing have moved to a much higher plane with Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.

Herewith the list of Best Books of the Year lists on which Lydia Millet's fifth book appears...check back here for updates, the Deities willing.

Christian Science Monitor In this humorous but compassionate satire, a Santa Fe librarian, in 2003 - thanks to a neat trick of time travel - meets the three physicists responsible for the creation of the atom bomb.

Toronto Globe and Mail

Raleigh News & Observer This brilliantly imagined, deeply impassioned novel transports three of the men who invented the atom bomb -- Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer -- to contemporary America where they confront and grapple with their nuclear legacy.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Millet has always been a quirky, contemporary writer, but this book is a quantum leap into the dark-fantasy territory of writers like Jorge Luis Borges. Featuring a story line that finds Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the atomic bomb - being feted like a rock star by militaristic, fundamentalist Christians when he returns from the dead, satires about modern society don't get any more twisted and insightful than this.

Kansas City Star

Seed Magazine

Booklist

Boldtype
The creators of the atomic bomb are mysteriously transported to modern-day Santa Fe, where they encounter confusion, celebrity, and infamy. Lydia Millet manages this dangerously high-concept conceit with generous, precise, and funny prose.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:35 AM | Permalink