"Meet, Pay, Love"
As promised, a link to the front page NYTBR review of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys. Also this, a chance to see some of the contributors tell their stories in person at Modern Times. Looks like an excellent program.
August 21, 2009
August 14, 2009
Front page NYTBR review for Hos, Hookers!
So excited! For a small press like us, it's always a lovely thing to have a book favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. But an absolutely glowing front page review is something that really doesn't happen all that often! In the forthcoming edition (8/23) of the NYTBR, Toni Bentley calls Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys "an eye-opening, occasionally astonishing, brutally honest and frequently funny collection from those who really have lived on the edge in a parallel universe." Congratulations to co-editors David Henry Sterry and RJ Martin for pulling together a truly wonderful anthology. Unfortunately, I don't have a link to the review yet, but here is another bit of it: "The collection is a wonderful reminder that good writing is not about knowing words, grammar or Faulkner, but having that rare ability to tell the truth, an ability that education and sophistication often serve to conceal."
June 17, 2009
Pasha Malla Keeps on Kickin' It
In case you hadn't heard: Pasha won the Trillium yesterday. Sweet.
June 05, 2009
And the award goes to....
Pasha Malla is on a roll. He's kind of a quiet, understated dude, and I think all the fuss may be making him a little uncomfortable, but hell if I care! I'm really pleased with all of the attention his gorgeous book of short stories is getting.
• He's the winner of this year's Danuta Gleed Literary Award
• He's a finalist for the Trillium Award
• He's a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize
• He's been longlisted for the Giller Prize
• And this just in: he's won the Ellis Award for the best short story for his contribution to Toronto Noir
And I'm thinking, the Canadians seem to be on to something here...
February 17, 2009
Dang. China Underground a Singapore Straits-Times Bestseller.
So we let China Underground go on sale in Asia six weeks early (it will publish here April 1st) because we thought there would be much demand. We didn't realize it would end up #9 on the Singapore Straits-Times Bestseller List...
January 15, 2009
Definitive review of a definitive account
So when David Rees and I were figuring out how to do a collected Get Your War On, we decided to be aggressive. Rather than have it be a collected, we decided to called it "The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008" and try to get David on network news as a pundit, or on some show that purported to gaze reflectively on the past eight years.
Well, we have complete control over how we subtitle a book so we did, and no control over TV producers and they ignore us, but some folks not only got the joke of the subtitle, they also got that it wasn't at all a joke. This is me quoting David Rees quoting J. Caleb Mozzocco
Here’s a nice article about the big GYWO book that google alerts found for me. (Google alerts is like TIVO for the internet.)
And you know what? Rees was right like, 95% of the time (One thing he got wrong was when one of his characters, shocked that eight weeks of bombing Afghanistan had yet to kill bin Laden, said that U.S. bombing raids must be like the elixir of eternal life, and that Saddam Hussein would therefore live to be 400-years-old). He was certainly more right more often than, say, The New York Times or NBC News or Newsweek or Time or Bob Woodward, and therefore deserves the right to put “definitive account” on his book more than just about anyone else who consistently commented on the war.
December 17, 2008
Best of lists are nice, but visionary lists are really nice...
Two Soft Skull peops are Utne Reader's 50 Visionaries who are changing your world in its November-December issue—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Favianna Rodriguez...
More than Marriage: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
We’ve heard just two sides of the gay-marriage debate—conservative talk-radio homophobes versus attractive same-sex couples—because the voices of queer people who are against marriage are consistently drowned out. This perspective is most raucously and frequently espoused by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, an outspoken critic of what she calls “gay assimilationists” who cast marriage—with its “1950s model of white-picket-fence ‘we’re just like you’ normalcy”—as the GLBT issue. Sycamore, who writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and blogs at nobodypasses.blogspot.com, argues that the GLBT movement’s focus on gay marriage distracts from more pressing issues: Rather than fight for marriage, which helps secure access to benefits like housing and health care, queers should band together to fight for universal access to these basic needs—“I do” (or don’t) be damned. “What I think is so sad about the gay marriage assimilationist agenda is that our dreams have become so limited,” Sycamore says. “And gay marriage is not a dream—the end of marriage is a dream.” Sycamore is also a prolific anthologizer, bringing together radical views on queer identities in books like That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull,2008). These perspectives are rarely if ever engaged by marriage advocates. “It’s really easy for gay marriage proponents to argue with foaming-at-the-mouth Christian fundamentalists,” she says, “but it’s very scary for them to argue with anti-marriage queers and actually have a conversation.”
The People’s Artist: Favianna Rodriguez
She’s going to make you shout. Favianna Rodriguez’s political poster art packs revolutionary punch, fused with crackling colors and don’t-mess-with-us mojo. “Gentrification = Predatory Development” thunders a billboard in her Oakland, California, hometown. “We Say Hell No!” In an image-saturated world, Rodriguez’s fearless, frank work is impossible to ignore. “I use art to transform global politics,” Rodriguez says. As the daughter of immigrants and a woman of color who grew up without many role models in the art world, Rodriguez gives voice to the global community, and, stepping in front of the artist’s traditional frame, she’s building infrastructure for next-generation women. Collaborating, educating, organizing, writing books, public speaking, everything—she says—becomes part of the artist’s work. Celebrating the work of other bold souls is also essential to Rodriguez’s vision. She recently coedited Reproduce & Revolt (Soft Skull, 2008), a collection of stunning revolutionary political graphics designed by global artists—all of which are licensed under Creative Commons, free to reproduce. “Favi is doing something that is extremely unusual right now—declarative political art,” says Soft Skull editorial director Richard Nash. “The dominant trend in political art has been ironic, subversive, which can be marvelous except for the slightly creepy feeling one can get that the only viewers who get it are the ones who are already possessed of the framing techniques needed to deconstruct it. The ones who get it, already got it. “Favi’s doing the is-what-it-is thing: gorgeous, direct political statements.”
November 23, 2008
My favoritist blog post ever
Andrew Krucoff just did this blog post that makes the cockles of my heart sing. We're experiencing a deep rich warm juicy feeling of being understood. A sense of why:
Curt, He Who Cannot Be Linked, once famously tried to end an argument with “I have friends in Iraq” which is qualification enough to handle I Wouldn’t Start from Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong by Andrew Mueller.Almost picked this for myself but Katie gets Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook with the hope she discovers a world beyond Van Morrison and the Dave Matthews Band. Might come in handy when you’re “seshing” at home too. (Bet you wanted Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me!)
Dorfman, I mean Foster, l’ve given this a lot of thought. I’m tempted to throw you Rebels Wit Attitude for it’s a path I see you on, but you can’t be a real man until you’ve reviewed poetry. You’re probably gonna say you already have but Subduing Demons in America: The Selected Poems of John Giorno should provide the tricks.
November 13, 2008
The kinda posters you get when your author is such an amazing illustrator...
October 13, 2008
"The Economist" on "The Seething Genius of Get Your War On"!!!!
Ta-da! OK, well, in fact, it's not exactly The Economist, but rather its sister publication, More Intelligent Life. But still, whatever you think about its politics (and you know, to give them credit, they're sticking with the free market despite a rough few weeks for that agenda...), their writers can write. And I've craved their approbation for a while. And now, courtesy of Get Your War On, I have it. And they admit they're wrong, sometimes.
Between fusillades, Rees reveals some surprising characteristics for an angry cartoonist. One is prescience; in early 2002, he was riffing about war in Iraq, although it would not begin for another year. In spring 2006 he began to rib John McCain for shedding his maverick suit for an ill-fitting orthodox Republican one. And he has long criticised the way America's relentless campaign in Iraq has pulled resources and attention away from Afghanistan, well before Barack Obama made this concern mainstream. It is worth checking his website for animated vignettes with these characters, which are reliably entertaining.But perhaps Rees's most striking quality is his persistence in spotlighting the unending bloodshed. The years have ushered a parade of Washington obsessions--the Iraq Study Group, the Plame Affair, the Democratic takeover of Congress, warrantless wiretapping, etc--yet Rees has been rare in his dedication to reminding readers that real people continue to die violently, and at an alarming rate. One of the last strips in the "Get Your War On" book, from August 7th of this year, could almost be the first oned (unfortunately an image of this strip is not available):
A: Will you remind me what our goals are in Afghanistan?
B: Same as Iraq: Large piles of dead terrorists. Freedom. Fewer beards. Bragging rights. Stability.
A: "Stability." How does that work, again?
B: Easy: you just invade a country and keep killing people until it calms down.
September 19, 2008
When Good Emails Go Viral
Our author Tim Wise (White Like Me, Speaking Treason Fluently) wrote on white privilege and the election last Sunday. I loved the piece, as usual, and sent it out to our media list: "This is Your Nation on White Privilege." It's now all over the internets...Exhibit A. Twenty blog-postings between midnight and 8am today.
July 19, 2008
"When Adam Named the Animals..."
A late-to-the-party-but-oh-so-worth-the-wait review of How the Dead Dream, by Frederic Koeppel, a critic at the Memphis Commercial Appeal who has been following Millet's work since at least 2002.
Lydia Millet writes strange, provocative, disturbing novels that illuminate recesses of the human psyche most people would rather not have revealed. At the same time, her work is horrifically funny, profoundly satirical yet committed and compassionate. Such previous novels by Millet as “George Bush: Dark Prince of Love,” “My Happy Life” and “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart,” will remind readers of Melville’s full-dark mode of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Billy Budd”; of Kafka’s short stories like “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist”; and Nathanael West’s bitter, incisive little novels, “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” all works that deal in different ways with isolation, alienation and loneliness, with complicated desires and quenched passions, with the weary workings of humanity worn down to an essential, terrifying nub, the locus where choices are extremely limited and profoundly inevitable.With “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint, $24), Millet delivers a novel that strips a character of all pretense, custom, habit and certitude, even of personality, to leave an entity that moves blindly forward in a world of blunt instinct. Even as a boy, the novel’s central figure, T., loves money, examining the faces of the Founding Fathers depicted on currency to understand their characters: he admires Andrew Jackson because it seems as if “no passing insult could compel him to emote.” This slightly curious locution mirrors T’s own sense of formality and detachment; he requires neither friends nor praise, only the satisfaction and protection that success and money bring. Though a genius at business, he lives modestly, alone, but in the grip of a vision:
Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.
Yet contingencies arise, cracking T’s world of purpose and discipline. First, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote; getting out of his car, stunned, confused, he sits with her as she dies: “the fullness, the terrible sympathy.” T.’s father unaccountably leaves his mother; she moves in with her son and gradually becomes obsessed, then eccentric, then demented. Improbably, T. acquires a girlfriend — “it was her self-possession that got him” — but there is a flaw in her heart, an unpredictable nick of the sort that doctors only know is there after a person inexplicably dies. Now T. begins to realize: “Authority was not all.”
More on their blog.
July 07, 2008
One seriously happy author...
A few minutes ago I got to e-mail Martin Millar, the world's greatest Buffy fan, the link to a review by Colleen Mondor in this month's Bookslut in which she says that he "lifts the entire oeuvre of werewolf stories up, in a manner similar to what Joss Whedon has done for vampires."
Moreover, not to be crass but we've sold more books for him in the past eighteen months than he sold in fifteen years, with four publishers (including Fourth Estate) and seven titles. It feels really damn good to find a writer the readers s/he deserves, quantitatively and qualitatively. That's the core of what publishing is, really...
I'm hoping we can keep it up with his next book, Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me.
May 21, 2008
Yay for a Canadian!
The translator of Mercury Under My Tongue, Sheila Fischman, has won the Molson Prize. Which, though unfamiliar perhaps to us down here, except as regards its sponsor, is a mega-big-deal. To quote the PR (appears in full after the jump):
Two Molson Prizes, worth $50,000 each, are awarded every year to distinguished Canadians, one in the arts and the other in the social sciences or humanities. The prizes recognize the recipients’ outstanding lifetime achievements and ongoing contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of Canada.
May 19, 2008
Dead in Desemboque in the El Paso Times
Great review of Dead in Desemboque in today's El Paso Times! (A first for us...)
This marvelous chronicle of a death foretold is a stunning achievement that invites comparisons to Homer's "Odyssey" -- also a story about a love disrupted by the trials and tribulations during one man's dangerous journey back to the arms of his beloved.The changing illustrators give each episode a distinctive and appropriate tone, and Eddy, though his appearance changes slightly with each section, remains an endearing down-on-his-luck hero through every panel and every peril.
Arellano's text in "Dead in Desemboque" moves the genre into a more literary sphere, though it maintains its roots to the tried and true Mexican tradition of engaging storytelling. This graphic novel, aptly subtitled "Historias de Amor y Sangre" ("Tales of Love and Blood"), is a grown-up, old-fashioned Western at heart that highlights the Mexican male in a leading protagonist role and not in a secondary, stereotypical depiction.
This intra-lingual, international historieta is an excellent addition to the popular graphic novel genre.
May 08, 2008
We got USA Today to say "masturbation." Hee, hee.
May 04, 2008
African Psycho a finalist...
...for the 2008 Believer Book of the Year. As is Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin, in this instance for last year's novel Remainder.
March 30, 2008
Monday's Reviews Today: Black Flies
Starred PW for Black Flies by Shannon Burke.
Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city’s best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment. Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross’s rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child—believed to be stillborn—will alter the course of both men’s lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross. (May)
March 28, 2008
We're in a poem!
And the poem's called Viagra.
March 19, 2008
CBS Sunday Morning on Paris Cafe
Soft Skull's first appearance on 60 Minutes since the Fortunate Son debacle of 2000. This one, featuring Paris Cafe was a wee bit milder.
January 27, 2008
A good weekend...
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!
January 07, 2008
Guatanamo—wins Three % Best Translated Book; reviewed by New Yorker...
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...
December 04, 2007
Telling It Like It Is...
A Best Business Book of the Year from Strategy & Business Magazine. And THE Best Entrepreneurship Book..."[b]ecause David Silverman does not flinch from sharing the most painful and revealing lessons of his journey..."
November 30, 2007
NBCC's Most Recommended #7: How the Dead Dream
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.
November 27, 2007
Two for Two in Canada: Sylvain Trudel wins the Governor-General
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.
November 07, 2007
Giller Prize in the house
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.
November 05, 2007
New newness
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.
September 11, 2007
Cinema of Transgression, "Deathtripping," and "Llik Your Idols"
So there's a rather excellent interview with Angelique Bosio, in which she discusses her film Llik Your Idols which documents the still-influential (and still underground) Cinema of Transgression. She was asked, why hasn't a documentary about it been made before now?
I know there was something done about Richard Kern (photo sessions being filmed). SA Crary did "Kill Your Idols" about the NY music scene in which Foetus, Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch etc...appear. To my knowledge, nothing on film was made about the COT specifically. But maybe these documentaries simply never got out. I'm sure I'm not the only one having thought about it! I bet it's just because people couldn't make it happen for technical or financial reasons. Or because these filmmakers didn't want to participate in such a thing until recently. Or more possibly because Deathtripping by Jack Sargeant was such an excellent and complete book about it! Actually the book will be published in a new version in December by Soft Skull. I strongly recommend it.
Ah well thanks very much.
July 31, 2007
Bloggers unite!
The LBC Read This! Jamestown.
July 09, 2007
Bookslut lovin'
In the Land of Book Sluts, when you're back from the dead, you get to be a heartthrob...
June 05, 2007
The Awards Twofer: Quill & Lambda
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.
February 26, 2007
The Bronte Prize
Well, whodathunkit. In this morning's e-mail:
From: "<_______@bronteprize.org> Date: February 25, 2007 3:12:43 PM EST To: publicity@softskull.com Subject: Bronte Prize Nod - Roger Alan Skipper Roger Alan Skipper's "Tear Down the Mountain" has been named as one of five finalists for the 2007 Bronte Prize, romantic fiction's biggest award.You can find more details at: www.bronteprize.org
Truly
Tally Dawson, Ph.D.
Chairwoman
The Bronte Prize
_________@bronteprize.org
I have to say though, that any romance book award that includes Nora Roberts, Sara Gruen, and Roger Alan Skipper, has one helluva open-minded jury. Kudos to them, I hope the award itself gets some good attention, I'd love to see that kind of spirit rewarded...
January 22, 2007
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart shortlisted for Arthur C. Clarke Award
The wonderful Oh Pure and Radiant Heart has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the major British SF award.)
December 11, 2006
Two books on The Scotsman's Year-End list...and Lynne Tillman on KCRW's Bookworm...
Nice mention of both Oh Pure & Radiant Heart and American Genius A Comedy by the Scotsman’s critic, Stuart Kelly...
But the major developments were all transatlantic. The old guard gave a very poor showing, with John Updike's flaccid take on fanaticism (Terrorist); a rather paint-by-numbers Paul Auster (Travels In The Scriptorium); a slight take on ageing from Philip Roth (Everyman) and an otiose further volume of memoirs from Gore Vidal (Point To Point Navigation). That said, the wow factor was all American.Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day received some snotty reviews that missed the point with almost thrawn critical blindness - it's a hoot, an elegy and has a talking dog that reads Henry James. Ken Kalfus' A Disorder Peculiar To The Country managed to give an original and pitch-black-funny take of September 11, and Chris Bachelder's US! fulfilled the promise of his earlier Bear Vs Shark, imaging a world where veteran socialist novelist Upton Sinclair is back, angry and constantly assassinated. Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions was a freewheeling, psychedelic roadtrip, and easily the most gorgeous piece of book design since - er - his last book, House Of Leaves. Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy was a manic monologue (and I'm still unsure what it all meant) and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure And Radiant Heart made the most unbelievable plot (three nuclear physicists from the 1950s reincarnated in contemporary America) more than just credible: it undermined how convincingly real we are.
Also Lynne Tillman will be on KCRW’s Bookworm on 12/14/06...Check it out!
December 10, 2006
Beyond Race Magazine
Nice piece on Soft Skull at a new quarterly magazine called Beyond Race...runs the gamut from painting, to hip-hop, to theatre, to tattooing...
November 07, 2006
Good Fairies Amazon.com Top Ten SF/Fantasy of 2006!
The Good Fairies of New York was just selected as a Top Ten SF/Fantasy of 2006 by Amazon.com' Editors! Note also that blogger fave (everyone's fave?) Jeff VanDerMeer's Shriek is there too!)
November 06, 2006
Hal's a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize
Hal Sirowitz's "Life is Supposed to be Noisy" from Father Said won Second Prize in the the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize
Littell "Non!" Soft Skull author Alain Mabanckou "Oui!!!!"
Alain Mabanckou, author of the forthcoming African Psycho, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley, just won the French book prize the Prix Renaudot, beating out the much-touted (and much-paid-for) Les bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell...
October 24, 2006
We {heart} Large-Hearted Boy's Booknotes
Much as we'd like to like Booknotes just on its own merits (though we do, we do, and you should too), we're liking it right now especially because of the profusion of Soft Skullers that have popped up there recently.
Those merits, not-so-incidentally, are that Mr. Large-Hearted Boy invites writers to talk about the music that inspired them, or that accompanied them as they wrote, or that might serve as a soundtrack for the reader...
So herewith four Soft Skuller's responses (And make sure you scroll down, cause there's a bonus prize from Mark Swartz at the end...)
There's CAConrad, of Deviant Propulsion (of which Sam Delaney says: "[B]brilliantly tough, now jaw-droppingly romantic, witty, outraged, yearning, and often unabashedly lovely. With a clarity of language that makes the bones sing, they sneak past our defenses and do things, directly, surprisingly, irreparably, to us...")
There was this crazy fag I met when I was 19 and he LOVED the band X, and soon enough I too was a crazy fag, LOVING the sound of that wicked bitch EXCENE CERVENKA! Excene drag is the BEST drag to do man! Curdled punk swaggering out, "A THOUSAND KIDS BURY THEIR PARENTS!" All my writing has come ashore on white caps and pounding curls of song. Continues...
Lynne Tillman on American Genius
Glenn Gould playing Beethoven Sonatas equaled: we’re in this game of imagining together. You can hear him humming happily sometimes beneath the music, and it’s reassuring. He goes in and out of range nicely, the way my protagonist does. Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations: concentration aid, since Bach’s logic and reason are merciless, and this novel reckons with reason and unreason all the time. Bach kept me in line.But then there’s the irrational, which is as much what the novel’s about, and which is always compelling, so let’s say it’d be Miles Davis’s “You’re Under Arrest” : a wake up call and a reminder of how bad things really are. There’s an insanity – or unreasonableness-- I need when writing anything, and Miles supplies it, except when he plays ballads, and then he stops everything and holds it in place. Sometimes Hole’s first CD worked for adolescent angst, which never goes away completely, when nothing can ever be right. Courtney Love sounded like an aggression I needed to usurp for the novel at times.Continues...
And the ravishing Michelle Embree of Manstealing for Fat Girls...
CRAZY TRAIN — Ozzy Osborne: I still get pretty riled up when I hear this song. In the eighties, I would go insane. Ozzy was something punks and the burn outs had in common; Ozzy, weed, beer (though not necessarily in that order). The name OZZY next to a big pot leaf was spray painted on pretty much every available surface. And I don’t think it was really a tagging thing, I think that is just what stoned working-class-suburbia, white-dudes painted on a wall whenever they got the chance. Continues...
And, as promised, a bonus from Mark Swartz, of H20:
Call it Water Music. This isn’t the soundtrack to the nonexistent movie of my eco-noir novel H2O, but to one proposed way of reading the book. The first three people who write me at swartzmark [at] yahoo (friends and family excluded) win a CD-R of the mix.
Chapter 14.TEXT: We settled in a far corner, out of earshot, but neither of us said a word as the room filled. She took me by the hand, but I didn’t know whether it was a true gesture or part of the act.
AUDIO: Marianne Faithfull, “Don’t Forget Me,” from 20th-Century Blues. It’s about a breakup, but for a long time I thought it was about dying. I’ve never heard the Harry Nilsson original. Continues...
And, if you've not yet checked it out, the Flash trailer for the book!
October 17, 2006
"Perversely Brilliant"
Nice little round-up of some recent Soft Skull titles...
September 18, 2006
Bookforum and BOMB
The new Bookforum is out, with, delightfully, two reviews of Soft Skull books—American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman, and Mark Swartz's H2O, though sadly neither of them are available online—much other stuff there though.
However, the Geoffrey O'Brien interview of Lynne Tillman in BOMB magazine (not [yet?] online) is partially transcribed by Brian Sholis at In Search of the Miraculous...
Also, apologies for the lack of posting last week, the German Book Office had me in Munich and Berlin meeting a gazillion German publishers and editors, in the company of folks from Arcade, Grove, Melville House, Graywolf, and Publishers Weekly. Will try to post some little bits about all that later this week...
August 18, 2006
Three bloggers heart...
...CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion, all in one day. Ron Silliman. Joe Massey. Bill Knott.
May 01, 2006
Two Soft Skull authors finalists for PEN Awards!
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...
March 29, 2006
You Know You've Made It When...
...you're name-checked in The Onion.
Somehow this feels more (g)ratifying than the full page photo of the office in US News & World Report.
March 26, 2006
Queer Awards Galore...
So the finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards and Publishing Triangle Awards have been announced and we're pleased to report multiple finalists from the Land of Soft Skull, with particular kudos to Charlie Anders, a doppel-finalist...
Tennessee Jones for Deliver Me From Nowhere a Lambda finalist in Transgender/GenderQueer
Charlie Anders for Choir Boy a Lambda finalist also in Transgender/GenderQueer
Michelle Embree for Manstealing for Fat Girls a Lambda finalist in Lesbian Debut Fiction
Jennifer Camper for Juicy Mother a Lambda finalist in Humor
Douglas A. Martin for Branwell a Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award Finalist for Fiction: Men
Charlie Anders, again for Choir Boy, a Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award Finalist for Debut Fiction
It's also worth noting that two Soft Skull queer titles from 2004, Bend Don't Shatter and Kings and Queens: Queers at the Prom were both recently selected as New York Public Library Books for Teens and as ALA Popaulr Baperbacks for Young Adults.
January 02, 2006
A little awkward this, but...
...some nice news (though let me note, it wasn't single-handedly, and I consider this to be an award for Soft Skull as an entity...)
Washington, D.C., December 22, 2005: The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced today that Richard Nash, Publisher of Soft Skull Press is the recipient of this year’s Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. The award will be presented on March 15 in New York at the AAP Annual Meeting for Small and Independent Publishers.
The award, given annually, was created in memory of Miriam Bass to honor her many contributions to the book publishing community and is co-sponsored by AAP, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and National Book Network (NBN). It carries a $5,000 cash prize, which is fully funded by Rowman & Littlefield and NBN.
A judging committee representing a cross-section of the publishing industry selected Mr. Nash based on his tireless and visionary work at Soft Skull Press. Mr. Nash single-handedly took a struggling company and turned it into one that has become synonymous with excellence in literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Mr. Nash has demonstrated a remarkable ability to find and publish exciting and challenging new works as well as skill and creativity in getting his titles noticed, reviewed and publicized. Soft Skull titles have been featured and reviewed by national publications including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly and Vanity Fair, and on television programs such as “The Today Show,” “20/20” and “48 Hours.” The Neighborhood Story Project, a community documentary program in New Orleans, garnered national attention as well when Mr. Nash and other printers donated printing services and published books by four young authors.
When told that he was selected, Mr. Nash said, “I think of an award like this as a symbol of something much larger than the individual recipient. It's a celebration of the remarkable ecology that is independent publishing and it is an honor to be, for a moment, representative of that beautiful ecology.”
Jed Lyons, President of Rowman & Littlefield commented, “Miriam Bass loved creativity in people, especially when it was in service to the book business. Miriam would have heartily approved of the selection of Richard Nash who is one of the most talented and audacious people in our industry.”
Nominees for this award may be engaged in any area of book publishing provided their publishing house is independent. This year’s judging committee was composed of Peter Burford (Burford Books), Tom Dwyer (Borders Group, Inc.), Francine Fialkoff (Library Journal), Ron Powers (Ingram Book Company), John Whitman (Turtle Books) and Marcella Smith (Barnes & Noble).
December 18, 2005
The NY Times & Wash Post Double Whammy, or, Idealism and the Half-Jews, or The Passion of Chosing Christmas Trees
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.
December 06, 2005
Good, Better, Best, Best, Best...
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.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.
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.
October 28, 2005
We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs
Being is this is a blog, and being as we are publishing a book about/by Iranian bloggers, it does behoove me to alert you all to the great coverage this book has been getting in the UK (where it has already been published, by a wonderful new independent called Portobello Books).
First off Boyd Tonkin writing for The Independent has the nicest things of all to say about it:
This is not the first example of a book made out of blogs; the Iraq war spawned a couple. It does, I think, count as the finest so far: an eye-opening collage of extracts from the (roughly) 64,000 Farsi-language bloggers now at work in Iran, threaded by Alavi's illuminating analysis. The title aims to tease, and to provoke. This online Iran - young, liberal, freedom-seeking and rights-hungry - sounds a world away from the electorate which, this spring, gave a presidential mandate to the Islamist hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the blog selection does make room for many political dissidents and reforming clerics, as well as for a host of fun-starved youngsters to whom figures such as Marilyn Manson, Harry Potter and David Beckham matter more than any mullah. Though even the mullahs have moved - the clergyman Hussein Khomeini, to take one stunning example, has stated that his grandfather simply did not have the authority to slap a fatwa on Salman Rushdie.Alavi's theme-by-theme compilation, with the background filled in by her expert commentary, adds up to a vibrant portrait of a dynamic but thwarted nation - two thirds of Iranians are under 30. Bloggers may not yet rank as typical citizens, in Iran or anywhere else. Nonetheless, their energy, mischief and sheer courage - with jail a real risk - allow us to "eavesdrop on the clandestine conversations of a closed society".
The form of We Are Iran counts for as much as its content. Weaving the web material into a seamless narrative, with photos and cartoons scattered throughout, Alavi deserves to attract an audience far wider than the usual specialist readership for works on Middle Eastern affairs. Many literary folk have been quick to complain that online ventures steal from the culture of print. Yet the traffic, as this book proves and others surely will, can profitably run both ways.
The primus inter pares of Iranian bloggers, incidentally, is Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder. He's the guy that turned on Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East correspondent onto We Are Iran; Dickey wrote a great preview piece on the book earlier this summer, with the wonderful title Writing Lolita in Tehran.
A curious query from Iran: “Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of Weblogs?” I confess, this little detail of modern life in Tehran—which tells you so much about young people desperately in need of self-expression—might have slipped right by me if I hadn’t been sent a new book called “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs.” Written by Nasrin Alavi (a pseudonym), and due for international publication this fall, it’s a survey of the personal diaries that Iranians post online. Five years ago, there were none. Now there are many tens of thousands. And you won’t get a better glimpse of the obsessions and frustrations that exist behind the imposed cliché of the black chador; ideas and passions that thrive despite the rule of what Alavi calls “mutant Islamists.”Some of the bloggers’ language is very tough: “I s--- on the whole of Hezbollah.” Some is deeply evocative: “Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your Mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just cannot remember the color? Has it ever come about that you call your Mother up from far away and ask her to describe the color of those tiles—at which you both uncontrollably sob?” Many Iranian women write with brilliant bitterness from their anonymity, and about it. “In the obituary columns instead of my picture, they place a picture of a rose,” writes one. “[Because] the image of a woman can ensnare a man.”
As mentioned in a previous post, Nasrin Alavi will guestblog here around the end of November, and we'd love to have her do what Kevin Smokler calls a Virtual Book Tour, so if any bloggers out there are up for hosting Nasrin arounfd the end of November, please do give me a holler.
(Update: Nasrin reacts to the vile comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on OpenDemocracy.net. "The speech of Iran’s president calling for Israel’s destruction is a sign of domestic weakness not international strength," she says.)
October 25, 2005
Drugs [in the rain] Are [very] Nice [indeed]
Lisa Crystal Carver is the author of Drugs are Nice which is publishing this week. Lisa'a having a wild shindig tonight, first at KGB, 85 East 4th Street, where she will give an unconventional and unforgettable lecture on post punk: why it happened and what went wrong. Accompanied by ethereal comic artist Dame Darcy on the singing saw, Lisa will draw diagrams and dry erase, explaining how chaotic, self-violent, transgressive performers like GG Allin, Suckdog, Lydia Lunch, and The Swans came to be. Also why they didn't wear colors and why they smelled so very bad. She will then turn the room (by top secret methods we would die rather than disclose here!) into a physical representation of ten minutes of the era she like to call "the late 80s, early 90s."
Then, since that's not enough, she's going to have a full-on party at Galapagos at 70 North 6th St in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I can't really say what exactly will happen there, but check out this interview with her in this weeks Philadelphia Weekly
Speaking of love from the alt weeklies (and this is what earns this the Shamelessing Hussying and Gloating categories), here's some more links to all the great things being written about Lisa this week: The DCist ; this from the Providence Phoenix: Provoke, provoke, provoke, spew, spew, spew, rant, rant, rant. Lisa "Suckdog" Carver has a million ways of foisting her opinion on you.; and from the Philadelphia City Paper, which requires me—because of content rather than any required subscription, to quote it in its entirety:
The Further Decline of Western Civilization
Lisa Carver must be post-post-punk. All the press photos for her new book, Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir, have her looking sorta sedate, posing with her kid and her dog. Like aw, the former fuck-off frontwoman of Suckdog has decided to drop her guitar and spend more time with the family. Of course if she were completely over it, she wouldn't be on tour reading from the diary of her misspent youth and lecturing on where post-punk went wrong. Yes, lecturing. Like with diagrams, time lines and a dry erase board. She'll expand on it with musical asides, backed by Meat Cake zine-maker Dame Darcy on the singing saw. Even when she was called Lisa Suckdog, everybody knew her as one of the most analytical minds in punk — that wasn't supposed to be a backhanded compliment — so she's exactly who you want discussing punk in scientific terms. Because when the lesson gets to the part where G.G. Allin smears shit on himself and calls it art, trust me, that's not pop culture, that's anthropology.
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