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It appears folks like How the Dead Dream this weekend
San Francisco Chronicle
Toronto Globe & Mail
LA Times
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Previously:
Village Voice
LA Weekly
Eye Weekly (Toronto)
Washington Post
And a radio interview.
Oh, and this Bizzaroworld review from the Vancouver Sun that considered Lydia a lesser Tom Perrotta? Ha!
So Baltimore has a story-telling series, The Stoop, much on the spirit of The Moth. Much as I adore The Wire and its forerunner Homicide, it's nice to see this Baltimore incarnation is on The Stoop rather than The Corner. And, as usual, I only find out about it because one of our peops, Jonathan Scott Fuqua, he of Gone and Back Again, read there...Video here.
"The Last Book is a project to compile written as well as visual statements in which the authors may leave a legacy for future generations. The premise of the project is that book-based culture is coming to an end. On one hand, new technologies have introduced cultural mutations by transferring information to television and the Internet. On the other, there has been an increasing deterioration in the educational systems (as much in the First World as on the periphery) and a proliferation of religious and anti-intellectual fundamentalisms. The Last Book will serve as a time-capsule and leave a document and testament of our time, as well as a stimulus for a possible reactivation of culture in case of disappearance by negligence, catastrophe or conflagration.Contributions to this project will be limited to one page and may be e-
mailed to lastbook.madrid@gmail.com or mailed to Luis Camnitzer, 124
Susquehanna Ave., Great Neck NY 11021, USA. In case of submission of
originals, these will not be returned. The book will be exhibited as
an installation at the entrance of the Museum of the National Library
of Spain in Madrid at some point of 2008. Pages will be added during
the duration of the project, with the intention of an eventual
publication of an abridged version selected by Luis Camnitzer, curator
of the project. The tentative deadline is March 31, 2008."
The gorgeous thing about publishing a book (and mind, How The Dead Dream doesn't officially publish til Jan 25th, but folks are chomping at the post X-mas bit, it seems) is that the interviews come and you learn things about the book, and the author, and the author's next book, that you as editor and Head Pimp never knew.
Herewith from the interview in this month's Bold Type:
BT: Do you have animals? Were you able to spend solitary time with rare animals while researching the book?
LM: I have a pug dog and some tropical fish. And I did visit rare animals for the book, but not alone. Never alone. You can't be close to captive animals alone, really, short of doing what T. does in the book and violating the compact. Maybe there's an occasional fleeting moment at a zoo where you stand outside an exhibit and stare in and no one passes by you — maybe there's that. An arrested kind of moment in which you think for a second that it's just the animal and you. But you feel the artificiality of that moment, the frozen tension of it.
BT: Dream is reportedly the first book of a trilogy. What's next?
LM: The second book, called Ghost Lights, takes up where Dream leaves off, a few weeks later in the narrative chronology. It follows a minor character from the first book, a middle-aged IRS agent named Hal, who goes looking for T. down in the tropics after T. disappears.
One of publishing's primary prognosticators, Mike Shatzkin, has put in his fifteen cents for the year—here it is, and I'll make a brief comment on it—he overstates significantly the ability of existing companies to operate the future infrastucture, in particular his idea that Lightning Source and B&N will somehow take control of delivering eBooks to the iPhone. Why on earth would Apple bother—it's not as if they went to HMV for assistance in creating iTunes. Books are the last thing of Steve Jobs's mind.
Also, one more place to add to your RSS feed, probably the brainiest of them all...The Institute for the Future of the Book. if:book
I've been trying to keep track of all the important things being said about the [digital] future of books and I'm failing so I'm justing going to have to do a set of links as often as I can remember, and I've created a new category, The Future is Now. It'll be very ad-hoc, but I'm going to give you one link now—this—and some places that those of you who are serious about new business models should add to your RSS feeds, just as I have...
Booksquare
Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age
The Long Tail
Times emit
Medialoper
Most everything relating to Guantanamo the island falls into the better late than never category, and Guantanamo the book is no different. Published in Sept 2007, it was just reviewed by The New Yorker last week, and just won the vote at Three Percent (the Chad Post/Open Letter blog)
Other nice items on the book include the Words Without Borders review, and one from the Village Voice, as well as Time Out Chicago, and The L Magazine
And here's a link to German discussion for this of you endowed with facility in that language...)
When Dorothea was in town last year for the PEN World Voices Festival, she hinted that maybe, just maybe, she would write another novel, in German, just for Soft Skull, about Pfc Lynnie England. I suspect she'd bring the same humane touch to her as to the imprisoned protagonist in Guantanamo...