Soft Skull News

I don't quite know why I loved Elizabeth Merrick's interview with Jillian Weise as much as I did, but I do like it so very much. This is part of the reason:

What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?

I took a bus to follow a man to New York. I didn't know I was following him at the time but that became apparent when he got off the bus and we walked the same direction twenty blocks and we were standing at the corner of 57th and 9th. He turned around and said, Are you following me? Maybe, I said. As it turns out, he was already following someone else, an aspiring model, and on top of that he was a writer. So I waited and started writing some letters addressed to the man I was following. When I showed him the letters he thought they were okay and anyway, it didn't work out with the model.

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1. Never attempt to go on vacation before the biggest deal in your life and in the history of your company is scheduled to close. You will have insomnia; you will be trying to buy phone cards to make phone calls across nine time zones in a town with no shop, no cellphone coverage, and one public pay phone; you will be doing royalty statements on your laptop; and various things will go down that will constitute serious obstacles to your deal that you will overcome, somehow...
2. Using a variant on the word "fuck" in an interview with Salon will triple your company's website traffic.
3. "Nouns are the body, verbs are the life. Adjectives are the bloody dress they were found in after the accident."
4. Podcasts are truly wonderful things—when this deal goes through, there'll be more. For now: Matt Sharpe on NPR's Booktour, with a podcast from his reading at Politics & Prose.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...BEA. Poets and Writers covers it.

It was Saturday morning and Matthew Sharpe was late, but for a good reason. The author of Jamestown was supposed to be signing copies of his book in the autographing room of BookExpo America (BEA), but he’d just been named a finalist for a Quill Book Award, part of a program organized by NBC Universal and Reed Business Information that honors books in nineteen different categories at an awards show televised on NBC. Sharpe was busy being interviewed for MSNBC.

One of the draws at BEA is the free books—as many as you can grab to make up for the price of your ticket if you’re not a bookseller or member of the media. You can also have authors sign your free book for you, which is why one particular table was stacked with copies of Jamestown. A lone intern from Soft Skull Press, Sharpe’s publisher, was left to appease the people waiting in a line that stretched out into the children’s area of the convention center. It was the first day of her internship, and the people waiting in line, some with totes overpacked with books, were impatient.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matthew Sharpe's JAMESTOWN is a Quills Finalist in General Fiction and Michael McColly's THE AFTER-DEATH ROOM wins (yes, wins!) the Lambda Literary Award for Spirituality.

I know there was much slagging of the Quills these last couple of years, but looking at the company this year, I'd like to think it's going a little less lowest-common-denominator. So, you know, get excited about it, folks! This year at least! (Other on the short list: Pessl, McCarthy, Brothers by Da Chen and American Youth by Phil LaMarche...)

The winner is voted on by booksellers and librarians—any of you out there who need a copy, give us a holler.

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Janine Armin on Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory

Adding to his mind-altering oeuvre, which already includes poems, a novel, and works of criticism on subjects like Andy Warhol, Jackie O, and gay men’s penchant for opera, Wayne Koestenbaum delivers a coup d’état with Hotel Theory, a palimpsest of postmodern detritus presented in two parallel texts. On the left side of the page, “Hotel Theory,” Koestenbaum’s phenomenological study of hotels, provides the mental framework for the reader to act as a Bachelardian cosmonaut in the Lana Turner and Liberace dime novel “Hotel Women” on the right. Hotel Theory showcases Koestenbaum’s inflections via innumerable analogies to literature and art, and hotel interludes with guests ranging from Oscar Wilde to Richard Strauss to Marilyn Monroe.

Ed Park on Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown

In Jamestown, the future has arrived, and we get that loop writ large: a postapocalyptic Eastern Seaboard teeming with misunderstanding, wobbly truces, Technicolor violence, and moments of grace. But it’s also loopy: In the wake of a massive, undefined “annihilation,” Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, having recently waged the Battle of Joralemon Street. A Manhattan exploratory party, heading south in search of fuel, encounters a Virginia tribe of ambiguously ethnic Indians (one is named Sit Knee Find Gold—or is it Sidney Feingold?), who use wireless devices and appear to know English. In contrast to the ennobling austerity of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s recent foray into calamity lit, Sharpe amps up the Grand Guignol and the wisecracking, hurling the “linguistic detritus” of the early twenty-first century at us at warp speed. The story is a laudably freaked-out (and occasionally bewildering) cover version of the early-seventeenth century founding of Jamestown (England’s first sustainable colony in the New World), rendered as a narrative round-robin à la As I Lay Dying and reset in a rusted-out day after tomorrow that owes something to the variant futures of Philip K. Dick.

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