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So, poking amongst the underbrush of the NBCC's Best Recommended of 2007 I note a long list in which How the Dead Dream is #7 on the list of Most Recommended Books on the NBCC. Flanked by McEwan, Ondaatje, and Russo.
Well, it's been a good awards season for us in Canada. Elizabeth Hay won the Giller two weeks ago, and we're publishing her in Counterpoint in April 2008; now Sylvain Trudel wins the Governor-General for La mer de la Tranquillité—we're publishing his Mercury Under My Tongue in Feb 2008, and I promise we'll get the winning story collection out as soon as possible...It does have to be translated first.
The fun thing also, is that we get to publish him in English in the same country in which he won in French, which is goddam bloody exciting.
Kick ass profile on Lydia Millet (entitled "Oh Pure and Radiant Millet") by Louisa Ermelino in this week's Publishers Weekly. They've gotten much better about not hiding stuff behind the subscription barrier, which is deliciously nice.
Many choice items, I'll give ya two, one about her very first book, published by Algonquin in the mid 90's, and the other Ermelino's rather lovely description of How the Dead Dream her soon-to-be-latest.
“I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.
How the Dead Dreamis about the evolution of a young boy, T., obsessed with money—“His first idol was Andrew Jackson”—who becomes a wealthy real estate developer as an adult while ruminating on the big questions of identity, religion, death and nature. T. also experiences them: his father abandons the family to embrace his homosexuality and to work as a bartender in a transvestite bar in Key West, Fla., while his devoutly Catholic mother has a near-death experience and returns to tell T. that there's an IHOP on the other side with fluorescent lights and patrons “fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints,” not to mention that none of them were Catholics. T. takes to breaking into zoos, spending the night with the animals in their cages, finally setting out on a Conradian journey into the rain forest. The novel is pure Millet, dark, funny, brilliant, and a departure from all the others.
Oh and I can't resist a third which describes what happened when she turned in her second book:
Her editor at Algonquin was gone and his replacement called the book terrible, rude, inappropriate, filled with obscenities and without likable characters, notably the pornographer protagonist.
The second book was Everyone's Pretty, the manuscript languished unpublished for the best part of a decade, but it was that manuscript, touted to me by Josh Beckmann of Wave Books, that first turned me onto Lydia, and which we published before Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and re-issued My Happy Life.
In today's lead item on Salon, our man Rob Polner, editor of America's Mayor, America's President? casts doubt on Rudy's claims that he's the only Republican who can beat Hillary.
So I guess a 2007 subscription that is announced in late November 2007 is more a gift package than a subscription, but if we have a good showing, then I can make a strong case for why we should really do a solid subscription program in 2008. Plus there is nothing more useless than a book in my office. Or a warehouse... Soooooo, herewith, the Soft Skull It's-Been-A-Loooooooooooooong-Year 2007 Fiction Subscription, consisting of multiple goodies, but noteworthy for its national diversity: a Canadian woman, a Congolese man, a Turkish woman, an American man, a German woman, an American man, an American woman, another American woman, and a Japanese woman...
A Woman Alone At Night by Tamara Faith Berger " [H]ot...sharp, powerful."—SEE Magazine
African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou “Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation.” Time Out New York
The City In Crimson Cloak by Asli Erdogan "An exceptionally sensitive and perceptive writer who gives us perfect literary texts....”—Orhan Pamuk
Gone and Back Again by Jonathan Scott Fuqua " [D]arkly humorous…intimate…conveys pathos and heartbreak while maintaining Caley's rich voice."—Publishers Weekly
Guantanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann, translated by Tim Mohr. " Reading it can cause a sort of bone-chill to set in, and an even more discomforting sense of awe. ”—Village Voice “Excellent”—Playboy
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe. Quill Award Finalist. LitBlog Co-op Read This! Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2007. Nuff said.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez. The book that generated an Alice Sebold reader review on Amazon.
My Happy Life by Lydia Millet. Re-whet your Millet appetite before we publish How the Dead Dream in January…
Vibrator by Mari Akasaka, translated by Michael Emmerich. “Disturbing and original”—Esquire
And the 2006 bonus (cause there’s always a bonus with Soft Skull): H20 by Mark Swartz. "A short, sharp shock, a jab to the eyeball and brain, H2O by Mark Swartz is a more telling commentary on our society now as Don DeLillo's White Noise was in its time. Savagely precise, clever but not shallow, Swartz's writing lacerates even as it's deeply, disturbingly funny."-Jeff VanderMeer
And may be purchased here.
...by voting for Typo by David Silverman, as Best Business Book of 2007. Why? Because the one thing I learned publishing this book is that nobody, and I truly mean nobody (but Soft Skull) publishes a business book about failure. I was somewhat aware it was unusual when I started the process of publishing it, but it wasn't til the book was out there, fighting the retail fight, that it became clear that this was just a real no-no-no-no. So if you want to participate in the equally perhaps quixotic endeavor of persuading 800-CEO-READS to pick Typo, click here.
Stacey Richter's Q&A.
...is the title not of another post featuring my new daughter, but rather of a new book, publishing this week, by Cris Mazza, featured here at Time Out Chicago, and interviewed here at Bookslut, and interviewed here at the Chicago Sun-Times, and reviewed by the Chicago Reader, so I rather think, given the forgoing, that a media outlet located somewhere other than Chicago should really get on board...
One book you might find in the catalog I posted about? Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air. Aka winner of this year's Giller Prize.
Apologies to all for the ongoing and unconscionable lack of fresh content on this blog...it is truly remarkable how naive I was about how involved and time-consuming the process of creating a two-imprint publishing company out of the three imprints of Soft Skull, Shoemaker & Hoard and Counterpoint would be. In a short while, this should produce a nice stream of cool new stuff on this blog, but at the moment, strained silence.
Anyhow, two new additions to the world, the first: our Spring 2008 catalog.
The second, my daughter, born Oct 24th, a much better reason to be behind on posting.
