Soft Skull News

For all you movers and shakers, galley-whores and product pimps, cheap-wine-swilling-bad-coffee-burping BEA attendees...the offical Soft Skull program for Book Expo America...

Friday, May 19th, 10:00-11:00am: Laurel Snyder signs Half/Life: Jewish Tales from Interfaith Homes, which Publishers Weekly hails as “engaging, funny, and provocative.” Snyder is a frequent contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of the award-winning magazine Killing the Buddha.

Saturday, May 20th, 11:00am-Noon: Australian author Delia Falconer signs her second novel The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, the follow up to her debut The Service of Clouds (FSG, 1998). Falconer is one of the top writers of her generation in Australia, but virtually unknown here, so far. Her new novel is a fresh look at Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn...through the eyes of the soldiers who did not go to his aid. And, as Colleen Mondor describes it in this month's Bookslut, “Lost Thoughts is part of a tiny field of books that reach inside the minds of men at war—of men of war—and seeks to explain and define and recognize them as the conflicted and confused and heroic and cowardly creatures that they are.” “A splendid and absorbing novel” says Jim Harrison and "a timeless work of human history," says Barry Lopez, National Book Award winner. Note: Delia Falconer will be available all three days of BEA to meet and chat.

Saturday, May 20th, 1:00-2:00pm: Roger Allen Skipper signs galleys of the only debut novel Soft Skull is publishing this year! Tear Down the Mountain is an epic love story set in modern day Appalachia by a laborer and luthier who never left the mountains. “Tear Down the Mountain is a welcome addition to fiction set in contemporary Appalachia. This book is terrific. Roger Skipper knows the landscape, the people, their values, how they feel, and what they say to each other. These characters live real lives in hard circumstances in a land that’s under assault. I loved it.”—Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight

And don’t forget to pick up a galley of American Genius, Lynne Tillman’s first novel since the 1998 NBCC Finalist No Lease on Life!

Also, for the first time since 2001, I won't be able to go myself (off getting married, as I promised Jenny D I would say on the blog, tucked away here down at the bottom...), so be nice to Kristin Pulkkinen, our amazing Publicity Director, and go get books signed, and introduce yourself to Delia Falconer who came all the way from Australia to be at BEA...(And if you don't see her at BEA, check out her touring schedule in Philly, Portland and Seattle...)

Back in three weeks!!!

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So Michael Standaert and Rob Polner are both now blogging on the Huffington Post, both keeping an eye on two quite disparate but, in their own fashion, highly dangerous components of the American Right. Polner, as befits a man who spent over four years following Hizzoner for Newsday and then edited America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York, has a "Giuliani Watch" in operation, while Michael, author of Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire is keeping us in the loop on the man who is credited as being "the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years...No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye," says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Congrats to Maggie Nelson and Clayton Eshleman, respectively author of Jane: A Murder and editor and translator of Conductors of the Pit.

Maggie was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir (won by Gregory Rabassa for If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents.)

Clayton was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (won by Wilson Baldridge for his translation from the French of Recumbents by Michel Deguy).

As many as Pantheon, PublicAffair and Knopf!

Happy days...Our first ever national award finalists.

An occasion to remind everyone of other incredible indie publisher successes in the past year, including Dalkey Archive's NBCC win for Non-Fiction, Akashic's LA Times Book Award finalist for Debut Fiction, Flood Editions, Other Press and Graywolf also with PEN finalists, a bunch for LSU Press, and obviously Copper Canyon, taking care of business all the time all over the map.

Not bad for us all, given the shit that hit the fan with the Nationa Book Awards a couple of years back...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)