OK, so here is the Reverend Jen giving out some valuable (and free) anatomical information. You may want to have a pen handy.
If you're still confused, you really need to check out the book. I just saw the Reverend read at McNally Jackson. She was wearing a silver sequined mini-dress and elf ears and she was amazing. I had never been at a reading staffed by a fully-uniformed butler handing out candy dots on a silver tray.
As I posted on Twitter a few minutes ago: Soft Skull Spring 09 catalog now available, yo. Download http://is.gd/8zrR & email for review copies. (Here's Winter 09 http://is.gd/8zE1 )
[Links not in the original :-]
Pharma Marketing News is doing a poll of its readers on who should be Obama's FDA Commissioner. Whistleblower (and Soft Skull author) Peter Rost was suggested. And oddly enough, he's leading! (Feel free to vote yourself...)
Though perhaps not so odd, in that Obama's Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel has been one of Rost's biggest supporters.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel released the following statement today [this is back in late 2004] at a press conference with members of the tri-partisan Rx Drug Coalition and Pfizer Vice President, Dr. Peter Rost debunking the myth that prescription drugs from abroad are unsafe. Dr. Rost is the first executive from a major drug company to come forward and speak out against the drug industry’s scare campaign. Dr. Rost and members of Congress will urge the U.S. Senate to take action this year on prescription drug market access legislation.
Dang. This could get interesting.
...and Benjamin Strong has something to say about The Pisstown Chaos.
[A]s usual, it is Ohle’s topsy-turvy mise-en-scène that’s the real main character. Like his precursor Beckett, Ohle knows just how funny, and also how frightening, a world without memory is (“Stars? Moon? I don’t know. I never looked up much”). Each of the novel’s twelve chapters opens with excerpts from the City Moon newspaper, and Ohle’s exquisitely rendered journalese is awesome in its deadpan illogic: “Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city, and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago.”
There's also Domenick Ammirati in Bookforum—
Unlike the writer to whom he is most often linked, William S. Burroughs, Ohle eschews radical prose play; the characterization of his writing as experimental derives from his grim absurdity, the flatness of his characters and tone, and his rejection of traditional novelistic arcs. His style is approachable and precise; he writes with dry humor in detailing the bizarre: impregnation by suppository, a Russian giant receiving a leech treatment, a job deliberately misfolding parachutes.
Part epistolary satire, part Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (the narrative, such as it is, alternates with cryptic and alarming Pisstown news bulletins), Ohle's book pulses with the cool logic of the insane—the kind of deadpan surrealism that Ben Marcus once memorably pegged as "apathy noir." The familiar battles the strange, and the duel ends in a delirious tie.
Finally, to give you a sense of the diversity of reviewing styles a book like this requires, the Brooklyn Rail:
There’s chaos in Pisstown tonight. Stinkers are roaming the streets—wretched souls who are not quite dead yet, but who are, without doubt, dying, slowly and inexorably, infested with parasites so potent and swarming that at times whole colonies can be seen roiling under the surface of the victim’s skin, devouring the host over the course of years, even decades, bursting out finally through the victim’s rotted abdomen in a flushing spray of “cadaverine” (no etymology dictionary necessary). Living among these putrid stinkers are the good, parasitically uninfected citizens of Pisstown, desperate to avoid all physical contact with the infected ones, with fear of the illness being so great. It’s an uneasy situation for everyone involved.
The excellent designer Adrian Kinloch is designing, and reflecting on, some covers for us. Specifically for a book we're publishing in early 09 called Watching the Door. (Subtitle also under discussion.)
Key considerations:
Book's about Northern Ireland, written by Irish guy with no platform in the US.
Book is hilarious, violent and a wee bit raunchy.
Selling books about grim, violent housing projects in northwest Europe 30 years ago not always that easy.
Book doesn't fit into conventional categories so well. (Part memoir, part political history, has "current affairs" type appeal...)
Occurs to me, writing this, that I shall also ask Jessa Crispin, who is a big fan of the book. [Here's her Smart Set review too.]
So Miriam Toews's glorious The Flying Troutmans is the fifth pick by Powells for its brilliant, needs-to-be-emulated-across-the-industry subscription program, Indiespensible.
Here's what you get, quoth Powells:
An exclusive signed and numbered first edition, weeks before the standard copy goes on sale. Plus, the Indiespensable edition includes:• Custom slipcase wrapped in mahogany paper with a linen embossment
• Book's title and author's name stamped in silver foil on the slipcase spine; matching foil stamp of the author's signature on the front panel
Dare I suggest: the right way for an indie publisher to go about an online exclusive?
I'd actually heard of this on Saturday, due to having a Google News Alert in place on "Bill Hicks," but didn't realize it was a news scoop til the British papers went mad for it. Hicks has always been more famous in the UK—the UK publisher sold over 100,000 copies of Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks, whereas we've done only about 15,000). So yesterday I got about another 25 more news alerts , giving me to realize I'd've almost made the blog a semi-genuine news source had I posted about it right away.
Instead, I'll just exploit others, like a true publisher, and just quote New York magazine.
In what will surely make Bill Hicks's zombie corpse rise up from hell in black-hearted rage, Russell Crowe has revealed that he has a "project based on the life of [the late] comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer." True, Hicks and Crowe both seem to have had an affinity for alcohol and picking fights with strangers, but Hicks might agree that a commercial biopic comes pretty close to "suckin' Satan's pecker." [SMH via Comingsoon]
And the requisite YouTube embed, a publisher's favorite:
Don't worry, this isn't a trend, but Laurel Snyder, editor of our Half/Life, has a forthcoming children's book (not published by us, our children's imprint Red Rattle is sadly no more), and herewith her trailer.
Warning: This Video contains blueberries and a baby from Laurel Snyder on Vimeo.
I've been waiting for the right opportunity to talk about this gorgeous sad neurotic gently twisted coming-of-age novel we just published a couple of weeks ago, called All About Lulu. But the reviews, while great, didn't quite capture how exactly this book exists in relation to its readers, actual and potential.
Then YouTube came to the rescue, via, of all places, Bakersfield CA...
...for saying this in a recent interview:
"That's why he was such a genius: He knew they would crack. Ultimately, he knew that he was right," Cho said, laughing. "It was irrelevant whether people laughed or didn't laugh; he was right about everything. That's why people fell in love with him: Because in our world there is so much insecurity, we are looking for people to stand up for us."
For which, she wins a free copy of the newly reissued Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks (pubbing October; advance copies now available...).
But how am I to get her her prize?... If any one knows, email me.
Obscene? Perhaps. But if you can't get enough of streaming social media...
A whole generation of film buffs grew up with Alex Cox. From 1988 to 1994, he presented Moviedrome for the BBC, his soft voice guiding you into the nether regions of cult film. After making Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, he wasn't just a hipster but a film-maker with credibility, and a moral compass that appealed to fellow artists including Joe Strummer, with whom he worked over many subsequent films. He always looked cool, in an etiolated, desert-bleached, Nick Cave kind of way.His new book doesn't offer much in the way of anecdotes, but is a very revealing look at the day-to-day difficulty of being an independent film-maker. Every student at film school should be obliged to read it. It shows how bad things can get: throughout his 30-year career, Cox provides ample demonstrations of how crass industry lawyers are, how bonds and copyright issues destroy the artistic impulse (intriguingly, he argues for a massive deregulation of copyright), and how big companies refuse to distribute films after having bought them. But it also reveals the sense of fun, of purpose, of liberation, that being a low-budget film-maker can bring.
[N]ot quite a memoir so much as a highly detailed, hugely compelling tour through the making of each of the entries in his body of work, beginning with Edge City, his graduation project at UCLA, through Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and so on, right up to Searchers 2.0. As such X Films is a workbook for any would-be cineaste of the independent/"guerrilla" stripe, and also a vital contribution to film history, insofar as it records with honesty and exactitude what were the creative and logistical decisions that went into making these bravely unclassifiable movies. The book...reflects Cox's own generous, passionate, instinctively polemical nature: he makes a great teacher both of film production and film history.
Also, word of a Repo Man sequel.
I love the covers of international editions of our books—this is particularly delightful. A free copy of the English-language edition of this to the first person to e-mail me the English title.
So although my aging body is show signs of stiffness, Soft Skull itself is as flexible as ever—6 weeks ago, I got an email from Tom Kelly, author of The Rackets and Empire Rising, telling me his forst book, Payback was going out of print, and that the History Channel was doing a 12-part series on sandhogs, and suggested we might want to reissue the out of print book, not in the least because he himself was a consultant on the project, appears in several episodes etc.
Six weeks later, Amazon is live with the cover. The book is at the printer. We publish early September.
It's nice to make things happen. And here's the author being interviewed by Charlie Rose, back when the book first came out.
(just a few seconds sadly, I'll show you a few more of them in the coming days—these trailers can cost money.)
...so I don't have to. Coming in October:
Click here, since Paul did the work, or read on if you must...
“The whole time I was thinking about Min. Well, I was also thinking about Marc and I was thinking about Cherkis, and I was thinking about what a world-class champion of fucked-up I was. One week ago I’d been a carefree bon vivant in the City of Lights ballin’ in the mad cheddar, as Thebes would say, and now I was passing out in gas stations and drinking wine out of the bottle with an imaginary animal for a boyfriend and a fifteen-year-old at the wheel. I didn’t know if we should turn around and go back home, head straight to the hospital, or crank it up a notch and haul ass to Twentynine Palms. Maybe drive all night. But in which direction?”—Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans
As a transatlantic transplant myself, writing on the 20th anniversary of my departure from the country of my birth, Ireland, I've occasion to note the weird disjunctures that territory-by-territory licensing of intellectual property engenders in the world of book publishing. That is, the little bits of fucked-up-ness that happen when books are published in the US and UK (and Canada and Australia, sometimes) months and years apart.
Our translation of Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo was just published in the UK, and got this marvelous review last week in The Guardian—Michel Faber on Dorothea Dieckmann's delicate dissection of the horrors of Camp X-Ray—although we'd published it in September of 2007.
There's a lovely piece on vinyl fetishism in yesterday's [London] Times that mentions Travis Elborough's The Long Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World, which we shall publish in April or May of 2009, while Jessa Crispin loved Kevin Myer's "beautiful, brutal," memoir of covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland Watching the Door so much, she couldn't help but immediately review it in her column in the US-based The Smart Set, even though we're not publishing til April of 2009 also...
In fact, I suspect that facility with which news of good work now travels across licensing territories is becoming such that we publishers are under increasing pressure to develop more reader-friendly approaches to how we handle the timing of publication...
Favianna Rodriguez is all over Bay Area radio right now. And print. And live in person. Who is she? Here are some photos from her launch party. She's the co-editor of Reproduce and Revolt aka ¡Reproduce Y Rebélate!: Imagenes Radicales para el Siglo 21.
Elizabeth Crane hearts Paul Fattaruso. And in a context I'd not heard about before, an endeavor called Field-tested Books. Mad cool. Click all around on the sidebar on the right once you're done checking out what she has to say about Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf.
Brought to you by Mark Budman, author of the forthcoming My Life at First Try, one of the Fall Counterpoint titles...
I mentioned them before, and now they've returned the favor. Three Guys One Book turn their attention to All About Lulu, our sweet-bundle-of-summer-coming-of-age-lovin.
After the jump, a medium-sized taste of how these guys interact. I think they're doing something rather special—not quite critic, because they are in too deep in the books. They allow themselves to become invested in the outcomes of the story itself. But they're not quite advocates for (or against) the book as such. It's somehow, I think, in their conversations, each is an advocate for his individual experience of being involved with the book.
Semi-related, nice item in the Los Angeles Times on how Lulu got optioned by an indie film production company.
Dead in Desemboque on sale in a few weeks.
...our Fall catalog. Download, check it out and email me a list of review copies, ya know? Cause it's hard to keep track of you fine peops and while I know it's nice to have me break it down, it's also nice for me to discover likes and dislikes of y'all's I'd never known about.
So I promise, in the coming months, to give you the skinny on some of the titles in the catalog, and you guys in exchange tell me what review copies you'd like, and we're golden.
[Oh and on the Counterpoint catalog, I particularly draw your attention to Graham Rawle's illustrated Wizard of Oz, and Miriam Toews's The Flying Troutmans, and My Life at First Try—I acquired the first two...]
...ever!
Jeff Van der Meer's latest prankish acticity: what beer is your book? This could warrant an entire blog of its own, quite frankly...
An announcement from our friends and business partners at the Gobshite Quarterly...
Attention all film & video geeks, cinema & film studies majors, videographers & would-be pornographers. (Actual pornographers need not apply.) The sickened & twisted & jaded folks at Gobshite Quarterly are pleased as Plato on percocet to announce a Contest on the Internet.
Rules: To qualify one must submit compressed video files on a compact disc, along with an SASE & cover letter identifying the filmmakers, to:
GobQ LLC, PO Box 11346, Portland OR 97211-0346.
There are three (3) basic rules:
RULE ONE: The film or video (whether 70/35/16/super-8 mm, H-D, x-ray, or kirkian photography) must be no more than sixty-nine (69) seconds long, & no less! Submissions of 68 or 70 seconds shall not qualify. Sixty nine (69) seconds is what entrants MUST aim for, & achieve—whether individuals or teams.
RULE TWO: The content of the film or video can be in any narrative form (dramatic, comedic), whether sketch, puppet show, live action or animé...but the content MUST be based on or inspired by curse + berate in 69+ languages.
RULE THREE: Audio in one of the 69+ languages chosen needs to be provided by native-speakers, or people at least fluent enough not to sound like stroke victims or grade school Spanish teachers . (If this rule is broken it better be broken brilliantly.) Submitted films will be posted on the You-Tube and be judged by a panel including the producer of Ramones' END OF THE CENTURY.
RULE FOUR: The first submission is free. However, multiple submissions must include a $10 entry fee (chk or money order).
FIRST PRIZE: $200, a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
SECOND PRIZE: $50, a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
THIRD PRIZE: a t-shirt, & a selection of Soft Skull titles.
Deadline: Films must be submitted by Bastille Day, 2008.
curse + berate in 69+ languages
being a concise compendium + verbal pictionary + day-for-night-book of salaams + salutations + greetings + schadenfreude + unblessings + invective + invidious comparisons + insults + sarcasms + snits + pouts + unkind words + anti-benedictions + obscenities, delicate + indelicate + blasphemies + verbal aggggresssssions + cris-de-coeur + merde-de-jour + esprit de l'escalier + sinister wisdoms + tantrums + thought-crimes + bigotries + dutch courage + tijuana bibles + german sense of humor + aneurysms-for-brunch + sit-next-to-mezes in approx. 90 languages - give or take a dialectic or uncivil war ...
Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages by R. V. Branham
By way of building a little buzz in advance of the publication of our brilliant and, shockingly, not-widely-read cult author David Ohle, a free ad-supported eBook:
Advance orders for The Pisstown Chaos were so low last year, I canceled the original May 2007 publication, and tried again, this time for July 2008. And to pull out more stops, this preview eBook.
Here's what folks had to say about his previous installment.
“...if—as was provocatively asserted in Don DeLillo's Mao II—the terrorist has hijacked the novelist's role within our culture, is it then somehow supercilious of me to report that Ohle has written a novel that will behead his readers? ... I’d like to propose that getting your head lopped off by Ohle's fiction is a strange and unforgettable experience....In The Age of Sinatra, Ohle has seemingly concocted some sort of covert Oulipian recipe regarding the fantastic versus realism....Think The Phantom Tollbooth in a Technicolor, head-on collision with the Book of Job....American readers should take note of this insurgent fiction writer, David Ohle, who flays the human condition to singular, hallucinatory effect.”—Village Voice, Best Books of 2004
“A friend from high school once called me in tears: He was trying to make a mobile out of dead bugs but was having trouble bringing them into balance. If he had succeeded, that mobile might resemble this book: delicate and grotesque, tragic and hilarious, precarious but perfectly balanced. . . . The Age of Sinatra, a litany of symptoms, is less like an ordinary novel than it is like a patient history. But those might be the stories we feel most keenly of all.” —Shelley Jackson, Bookforum
“Age of Sinatra is far more consumed with catastrophe than Motorman. The novel advances an anxious investigation into how changes to memories and bodies can affect the state of a mind or the mind of a state. Although much has changed from the age of Nixon to the age of Bush the Younger, Age of Sinatra demonstrates that Ohle continues to construct an intoxicatingly vivid and demented world that is both reflective and revolutionary.” —LA Weekly
“The Age of Sinatra ...stands on its own as a contemporary classic. A word of caution: This book is for very discerning readers only. An engrossing feat of visceral story telling, this dark obsidian humored masterpiece is that x-rated, A-plus and non-plus ultra Twilight Zone episode one fervently hopes will remain fiction." —Rapid River Magazine
“Ohle borrows from conventions of science fiction, mythology, absurdist theater, and political satire to create a destabilizing para-reality: a world to which we expect to be able to relate, only to find it constantly surprising us with characters and ideas that are both disorientingly foreign and piercingly familiar....Tell 10 different people to read this book, and all 10 will say it's about something different. But judging by the response to Ohle's first novel, there is one reaction they are likely to have in common: They'll want to read more.” —Texas Observer
“The legendary author of Motorman is back. In The Age of Sinatra, David Ohle is so attuned to reality that he has invented a brand new world to reflect it. Whereas what is generally called realistic fiction is busy cataloging what we wear and buy, Ohle is documenting our last secrets, and he’s doing it with droll hilarity, brilliance, and a genuinely original vision.” —Ben Marcus
1. "Early in her erudite and witty new work, Mikita Brottman, a professor of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art, notes the recent profusion of "books about books," ranging from lists of books we "must" read before we die to thoughtful studies of the novel by prominent authors like Jane Smiley. But when she starts her own contribution to the genre by provocatively comparing reading with masturbation—"the solitary vice," as it was known in the Victorian Age—we know we're in for a wild literary ride."—Shelf Awareness
2. Brottman acknowledges that nothing has given her pure, unadulterated pleasure as much as reading. For her, reading is an addiction. Like all addictions, it had its downsides, especially during her early years.
"I read all the time, [but] there were some things that reading did for me that were not positive," she said. "It alienated me from my family, and my country. It gave me an idealized picture of romance and what the world was like. And it made me socially dysfunctional."—Interviewed by Geeta Sharma-Jensen in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
3. Author is reading with Eileen Myles and Matthew Sharpe in the inaugural St. Marks Bookshop Reading Series, Thurs, March 27th.
4. Pictures from book party last week at the fabulous Atomic Books in Baltimore.
A double-bill o' bloggers (sublime Lauren and wise Matthew) tell us about a double-bill (Lincoln Center NYC, tonight) of Alex Cox, who attentive readers will recall is to be one of our authors, come August 2008...
In the manner of a certain familiar throat-clearing: I am sometimes asked what kind of books Soft Skull publishes—a recent rote response has been that we don't rule out any genre, it just needs to be a book that in some fashion is of-but-in-opposition-to that particular genre.
As with my generalizations generally, there's a little bit of truth in it—we just published a few weeks ago, our first ever relationships book Making Love, Playing Power: Men, Women, & the Rewards of Intimate Justice by Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio. He's an author who contacted us at the suggestion of Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist we publish (White Like Me) and has done what is in effect a political book on relationships best summed up (I hope) by the tagline on the cover...
"The reason men don't listen to women is not because men can't understand what women say [pace John Gray]. The reason men don't listen to women is because they can get away with it."
Basically, it argues that for relationships to work, we can't pretend that classism, racism, and patriarchy don't exist...
...to play New York City next year? Who knows. But it's enough to persuade me that after we do Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl in April, we should do his Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me in September. Check the interview in 3AM and the review at The Complete Review.
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.
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.
Hotel Theory is getting some folks all hot and bothered. They're stalking him (albeit gently). They're concerned it might not be "possible to be a hotel woman in today's day and age"...Or perhaps not? "All I needed was a vodka gimlet. And a naked Liberace."
There's some other nice online stuff—nice little review in the LA Times, the tireless Richard Labonte, Brian Pera performs real sleight of hand for the Fanzine, the inestimable Joshua Glenn enjoys it for the Globe's Brainiac.
But the Venom Literati, I'll confess they've found a model of literary blogging I find awfully hot. Gently stalking an author, oh yeah...
(Incidentally, it occurs to me that a catalog, the subject of a previous post, could be considered a sort of hotel...a thought I've nowhere to put but here)
Jamestown week in the Lit Blog Co-op... Matt Sharpe will post there tomorrow, it will be his first ever blog post, prepare your questions and witness his blogian deflowering...
So here are links that will reveal the future activity of Soft Skull and our Counterpoint mothership.
The Counterpoint Fall 2007 list is here (some topnotch stuff in there, from Jenny McPhee and The Littlest Hitler to Laura Flynn and Famous Writers School)—also, the catalog is without a cover, as we had to excerpt it out of the overall Perseus Basic Books catalog, so forgive the clunkiness...
The Counterpoint & Soft Skull combined Winter catalog here (and, you know, it'll take a great many blog posts to elaborate, or even summarize, so just check it out—and Soft Skull purists (!?) should know, there are books in the Counterpoint list that were once Soft Skull books, make sure to take a gander at the whole shebang—together with the Shoemaker & Hoard, we've made that list a wee bit more contrapuntal...)...
As regards the Soft Skull Fall 2007 catalog. Well, it just doesn't exist, mea culpa, there just aren't the hours in the day, so just check out the Coming Soon page...it's the de facto Fall 2007 list for Soft Skull (and boy do we have much much stuff, since there are a bunch of Spring books we had to reschedule for the Fall, especially some rather spectacular translations...Guantanamo, Vibrator, The City in Crimson Cloak...)
Lastly, there's the soon-to-be-entirely-enfolded-within-Counterpoint Shoemaker & Hoard Fall 2007 list. And when you see some of what they've going on—a new Donald Barthelme collection Flying to America, Tetsuo Miura's Shame in the Blood, and a new cultural history of rape—you'll see why we are psyched to be joining forces...
A lot, for one blog post, I know. Bookmark this sucka, please, it'll serve you well. And e-mail me for more info on anything that catches your eye, eh?
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.
Never thought a Soft Skull book would make the Fashionista blog...but if you're going to publish an epic poem based on the Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, that's what you actually got to be hoping for.
To whet your appetite for the next issue of TRANSITION Magazine...
The Avoidance Word Still Screams its Name
Half a century ago, the more optimistic poet-militants of decolonization imagined the world's races humanely detonated, then shuffled and reassembled into a hybrid creature of the universal. On one issue at least, today's African Union, Arab League, and U.N. have indeed become one: one monstrous chimera ready and willing to let Darfur be cleansed of Africa . Wole Soyinka has some words to say about this—well actually, just one.
Change will come, of that I am sure…
If there's a bright spot in Sudan , the East would be it. Sarah Abbas talks to Dr. Amna Dirar —Eastern Front politician, tribal leader, college professor, and, oh yes, woman.
Measuring Time
By Helon Habila. An excerpt from the novel.
Searching for Zion
They come from desert Ethiopia and mid-century America , and end up in the shadows of reggae clubs, reeducation courses, and the IDF. For the darker shades of Jew, settling in a harsh Promised Land is a dramatic leap of faith. Emily Raboteau goes hunting for black folks in Israel .
Poems from Paroles pour solder la mer
By Edouard Maunick, translated by Elizabeth Wilson.
Crossroads Republic
Lester, meet Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela, meet Lester Bowie. Lagos, Chicago. Chicago, Lagos. Brent Hayes Edwards reconstructs the handshake summer of 1977.
Camera Obscura
Who can forget the innocence of those fin-de-siècle days? That halcyon time when Michael Moore was still a cult figure, the Taliban still had offices in Queens, and Afghan medical students still recoiled at the thought that Monica Lewinski was not the most beautiful woman in America ? From Flushing to Kandahar , Harlem to Kabul, Alan Edelstein was there—and he has the tapes to prove it.
Salamanca
In downtown Khartoum , a mom-and-pop souvenir shop provides a lazy retreat for the local cosmopolitans. But who's that German crone trawling through the merchandise with a half-naked tribesman at her side? Jamal Mahjoub recalls a strange day in the family store.
The Heimat Maneuver
After World War II, Allied horse-trading left Poland 's treasured eastern borderlands in the hands of the Soviets. As compensation, Stalin gave the Poles Silesia , an ethnically mixed region to the west that happened to be a province of Germany . Forced German expulsion and “re-Polonization” ensued, but, as Chris Bebenek discovers, even in a unified Europe ancient blood feuds die hard.
So I see in next month's Poets & Writers, in which Mary Gannon has a great interview with/profile of Matt Sharpe, that Pocahontas has a MySpace page.
Whodathunkit...We learn her general interests are:
thinking in english, hanging out with my gal-pals, IM-ing, my wireless device, evenings in the cornfields, Johnny, my secrets. Definitely NOT violence or guns or macho men like my father (although I do love my father).
She's blogging too, this is the feed.
And here's some of what Ms. Gannon and Mr. Sharpe have to say about the book:
The speech patterns of the 1600s were something that he wanted to make reference to in Jamestown. "I wanted the book to bear the imprint or have the stain not only of contemporary speech patterns and diction, but also of Elizabethan and Jacobean speech patterns, so I turned to my favorite writer of that period, Shakespeare." The prose in Jamestown combines the rhythms of text-messaging patter with iambic meter, allusions to hip-hop culture and canonical poetry (Wallace Stevens's, in particular) strewn throughout.Language in general—its potential, limits, power, and failings—is a major concern in Sharpe's work. He sees the language barrier between the English and the Algonquians as a model for "the way in which each of us has our own private associations that inform every word that comes out of our mouths. Communication," Sharpe says, "is always an act of translation."
It's taken a little while, but folks are starting to realize how goddam brilliant this little book by David Griffith is. There's now an excerpt up at Utne, a profile in Pittsburgh City Paper, Sojourner's gets it, and Colleen Mondor is working in it.
Here's a bit of the bit that Utne picked up:
...One day I was walking down the hall at school and a kid passed me wearing the jacket. "That's my jacket," I said. "No, it's not," the kid sneered. One of the deans of the school was walking by and asked what the problem was. "Look in the sleeves," I told him, since my mother had written my name in black marker in each sleeve. Sure enough, when the dean looked, there was my name.Things were like that then. Open and shut. Yes it is. No it isn't. Everything seemed good, clean, and orderly. I learned that there was such a thing as justice-I had witnessed it.
At night, I was learning that war could be humane and just. Footage from the noses of smart bombs allowed me to see with my own eyes that American bombers weren't dumping their payloads indiscriminately over cities, like the Germans did to Britain and the Brits did to Germany and we did to the Japanese during World War II. These were "smart" bombs. This was a "smart" war in all the various connotations of "smart": intelligent; shrewd and calculating; amusingly clever; with a neat and well cared for appearance; fashionable and stylish; vigorous and brisk; causing a sharp stinging sensation.
Our history teacher didn't talk about the Gulf War. She didn't even pull down a map of the world and point to the Middle East. Then again, I suppose she had bigger problems to worry about-some kids in the class couldn't locate Illinois on a map.
Neither do I remember talking about the war with my friends, unless it was to ask whether we'd seen the latest awesome press conference footage-General Schwarzkopf standing in front of a television monitor narrating the flight of a bomb as it entered the chimney of a building or the window of a munitions depot.
I thought about the war the most when I was at band practice. That fall, the band director passed out the sheet music for Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945), a piece by Daniel Bukvich dedicated to the firebombing and subsequent obliteration of the German city of Dresden...
...at the SOMA Review who are running a John S. Hall Daily Negation everyday this week...
...a nice review of our fella George Tabb's second volume of his memoirs Surfing Armageddon: Fishnets, Fascists, and Body Fluids in Florida (George, if you click through, is further proof there are worse things than bankruptcy) here at a very interesting British webzine PEOM (aka Positive Energy of Madness)—you'll enjoy their interview with Dave Courtney, "Celebrity Gangster."
30% discount for the holidays, plus a free copy of Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary for anyone who places an order between now and Dec 21st!
For the inner curmudgeon Burn Christmas Burn
For the haiku lover Did I Wake You?
For the ranter What Would Bill Hicks Say?
For the gamer Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
For the child (inner or otherwise) The Saddest Little Robot
For the GLBTQ in your life (or for the 70's prom photos...): Kings and Queens: Queers at the Prom
Cause there was a New Orleans before Katrina, and there will be one after The Neighborhood Story Project
You wanna make a movie in 2007? Putting the Pieces Together: The Graffiti Model for Indie Filmmaking
Plus the subscriptions are still the best deal out there! No discounts there unfortunately, cause it's already such a kick-ass deal, but we'll still give you Sparrow's Yes, You ARE A Revolutionary
Some of you may be aware of the excitement generated when Jonathan Lethem mentioned to Mark Sarvas that he'd be writing the endnotes to the Library of America's edition of four Philip K. Dick novels. I therefore thought it worth mentioning that Jonathan himself is making another contribution to the book world at the moment, viz Patchwork Planet, a book of photographs by Kate Milford, of downtown Brooklyn, accompanied by texts by Jonathan, published by ourselves, and available exclusively through Bookcourt Brooklyn. So, buy it here, and here only...
All the details on the book itself after the jump, but Bookcourt will also be hosting a party for this fun project on December 7th at 8:00pm at their store on 163 Court Street in Cobble Hill to which all are invited!
The regular reader of the Soft Skull News Blog will have noted how I manage to connect just about any ole event in the world to a Soft Skull book...Here's a particularly fine example of that pathology, courtesy of Nick Mamatas...
The real world: TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home
The Soft Skull world: Under My Roof—A wild fantasia wherein a 12-year-old telepath creates a nuclear device and overthrows the US government.
Whodathunkit. On the Lenny Lopate Show, last Thursday, Isabel Allende was asked
What's the last great book you read?
Allende: Lynne Tillman, American Genius
The Shadow of the Wind by Ruiz Safon
So we've this rather fun new book about to come out and some of you might have even inadvertently come upon a reference to it in last Sunday's New York Times piece on graffiti movies, called Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody" The book—Putting the Pieces Together—is a behind-the-scenes/screenplay tie-in to the film Quality of Life (now out on DVD, though still having theatrical screenings here and htere), and it also has a big section on DIY movie-making.
The punchline of all this though is that they've a great video podcast. Click here to watch the first installment, and here to add the RSS feed and this is a little bit of what Ben, the director, has to say about this vodcast:
Making Quality of Life was sheer hell. Our lead actor dropped out. We lost our jobs. Personalities clashed. We were always worried about the cops shutting us down. We never had the money to do anything we wanted to do. Every fricking step was a struggle.But we adopted The Graffiti Model to get the shite done. And in the
process, proved that money doesn't mean anything, and passion means
everything.This vodcast series will pull back the curtain and tell the
compelling, behind-the-scenes story of how we made (and distributed)
this film with no money, against all odds.As you know, we have no ad budget to speak of, so we live or die on
guerilla marketing and word-of-mouth. Every person you share this with
is another link to proving you don't need money to be heard. It's all
about you, the grassroots.
The magazine that bills itself as "the magazine for high-minded low-lifes" has two great reviews—fascinating for us here at least—of Mark Ames's Going Postal and Claro's Electric Flesh as translated by Brian Evenson, the latter review a two-hander that also looks at Shelley Jackson's Half Life.
So we've a book coming out in November called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of Williams S. Burroughs, Jr., the memoir of the "Son of Naked Lunch." But, because this book has been so long in the publishing (long story to tell, I'll spare you...), some folks are already writing and talking about it...this from today's International Herald Tribune and then, next week, you can do an online chat about Billy Burroughs with writer David Ohle, who compiled and edited Cursed from Birth and who is also the author of the Soft Skull book The Age of Sinatra...
A study of 233 whistleblowers—the largest study on this topic ever conducted—found that the average whistleblower was a family man in his 40s with a strong conscience and high moral values. After blowing the whistle on fraud, 90 percent of the whistleblowers were fired or demoted, 27 percent faced lawsuits, 26 percent had to seek psychiatric or physical care, 25 percent suffered alcohol abuse, 17 percent lost their homes, 15 percent got divorced, 10 percent attempted suicide, and 8 percent were bankrupted. But in spite of all this, only 16 percent said that they would not blow the whistle again. The Whistleblower is the story of one such person, who gambled everything by telling the truth.
A truly beautiful review of Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, from Powells.com
As I read The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, I was struck by the notion of how much work must have gone into each sentence. There isn't a wasted moment anywhere, and I imagine there are legions of writers who would give their right arm to be able to express in a page what Falconer manages to do in a single phrase or turn of expression. Early in the book, she writes: "His mind also wanders. His life a set of dark rooms which he moves through. Some things he remembers, others he seems to have imagined." The economy of Falconer's prose is breathtaking, introducing us succinctly to the subjective memory of our protagonist. Stripped of superfluous flourish, yet vigorously evocative, Falconer delivers motifs and messages with tactical precision. Near the end of the book, Falconer writes:He wanted to write the lost thoughts of soldiers.
Not the grand heavy story, he has never known his life that way, but the seams and spaces in between. This is history too, he thinks, the weight of gathered thoughts, the cumulus of idle moments.
In the real world, Custer went out in what was perceived as a blaze of glory, while Benteen faded away, slowly destroying his career and his health through chronic alcoholism. In The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, he manages to rescue not only his humanity, but the memories of his fallen comrades from the dustbin of history, something best accomplished in fiction.
Should this, or anythign motivate you to click through to the Soft Skull buy page, click on the buy from Powell's button, to show them some love
Hi folks:
Apologies for the long absence and, in atonement, herewith TWO new subscriptions for all y'all. (I also know it is about time for some more pontificating and I promise a major screed on the subject of permissions and anthologies within the next few weeks.)
As you might imagine, after poetry and fiction it starts to get a little complicated figuring out how to allocate and compartmentalize. But, for this year at least, herewith two new more categories:
Pop Culture and Religion & Politics.
Here's the mix in Popular Culture:
Daily Negations by John S. Hall (yes, he of King Missile and "Detatchable Penis" and "Jesus Was Way Cool")
Putting the Pieces Together: The Graffiti Model for Indie Filmmaking by Benjamin Morgan and the Quality of Life Crew The book about the movie I plugged on the blog recently!
Surfing Armageddon: Fishnets, Fascists, and Body Fluids in Florida Called "the David Sedaris of Punk," by Resonance Magazine, George Tabb picks up where his last acclaimed memoir left off, crafting a humor and pathos filled teenage tale of growing up, losing one's virginity and overcoming abuse.
Did I Wake You? Crazy Haiku Chick by Beth Lapides with, believe it or not, the first ever blurb for a Soft Skull book from Greg Behrendt (author of “He’s Just Not That Into You”)
"Beth Lapides rocks
She is so very hai-cool
Read This Book Today!
It's like your funniest punk rock girlfriend decided to write haiku!"
What Would Bill Hicks Say? Famous writers, humorists, musicians and cartoonists comment on America by channeling their observations through the lens of seminal comic Bill Hicks.
Bound by Law—Tales from the Public Domain: By Day a Filmmaker, By Night She Fought for Fair Use!
by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins A manifesto and a teaching tool...about the attack of corporate copyright-holders on creative artists (film-makers, musicians, designers)...in the form of a comic book!
A $79 value for $50, inclusive of shipping!
And to our second new subscription...Readers of the blog will recall my discussion of Soft Skull's dive into religion publishing so I won't recapitulate here except to tell you about the titles in question.
Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Series and the Tim LaHaye Empire by Michael Standaert. An investigation and critique of the LEFT BEHIND series of best-selling novels as well as a critique of the political empire of Christian right evangelist-activist Tim LaHaye, and the surrounding culture.
Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson by Elizabeth Adams. An exploration of the man—Gene Robinson, the world's first openly gay Episcopal bishop—who many believe will be the catalyst for the breaking apart of the Episcopal Church.
Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes edited by Laurel Snyder. By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altogether diverse memories and reflections of a handful of Half-Jews, among them Thisbe Nissen, Katharine Weber, Jennifer Traig, Jeff Sharlett, and Joyce Maynard.
A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America by David Griffith. Inspired by the recent Abu Ghraib torture photos, this is Griffith's journey through the vast catalogue of violent and sexual images that have accumulated in our collective unconscious, a journey he seeks to understand through filters ranging from Flannery O'Connor to Susan Sontag to Andy Warhol.
The After-Death Room: Journey in Spiritual Activism by Michael McColly. A memoir examining the AIDS epidemic from a global, spiritual, and physical perspective, and the shifting territory where those perspectives meet, by a journalist and Yoga teacher living with AIDS
A $75 value, just $50 with free shipping!
Here it goes with anther subscription: Fiction 2006 with a 2005 bonus in the form of Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, a 2004 bonus of Derek McCormick's The Haunted Hillbilly, and a 2003 bonus Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father.
So here are the rides available with the purchase of a $100 Annual Pass to SoftSkullFictionLand...:
Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother by Douglas Martin "[A] tender, tragic portrayal of a doomed artist..."—Publishers Weekly
Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree “[A]s real and relevant as anything Judy Blume has written.”—San Francisco Chronicle
The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers by Delia Falconer "A splendid and absobing novel"—Jim Harrison
Electric Flesh by Claro, translated by Brian Evenson. "It was for tour de force performances such as Electric Flesh that God created language and the Devil created style.” —Tom Robbins "This is an astonishing piece of delirious, supercharged prose."—Salman Rushdie
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
The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar. "I [do not] understand why Martin Millar isn't as celebrated as Kurt Vonnegut, as rich as Terry Pratchett, as famous as Douglas Adams...Read it now, and then make your friends buy their own copies. You'll thank me one day."—Neil Gaiman
American Genius by Lynne Tillman (her first novel since the 1998 NBCC finalist No Lease on Life!) “One of America's most challenging and adventurous writers.”—The Guardian
Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas. A wild fantasia wherein a 12-year-old telepath creates a nuclear device and overthrows the US government.
Tear Down the Mountain: An Appalachian Love Story by Roger Alan Skipper An epic love story set in modern day Appalachia that poignantly and pragmatically examines the economic, spiritual, and emotional costs of living with lack of opportunity.
As previously mentioned, there's a wonderful movie called Quality of Life which opened this past Friday at the Pioneer Theater on 3rd between A & B. It's a San Francisco graffiti subculture movie, that, as one fellow viwer commented "is one of those movies that feels inevitable, but never predictable..." It also has a godo deal to say, on multiple levels about things like autonomy and accountablity, thigns that I and many indie mdeia operations finding themselves thigking about all the time...
Anyway, it's got one more week, order tix here.
Having been thinking about this for a while, and with the help of some prodding from AK Press and Clear Cut Press and One Story and Tin House and such (both directly and by example), we've decided to launch a Soft Skull subscription. It'll be category-specific and we'll start with poetry: all the poetry Soft Skull will publish in 2006, with a couple backlist bonus tracks to spur folks into action. (As the spiel goes on the site: "A new way to buy Soft Skull books, with subscriptions to follow in Fiction, Pop Culture, Graphic Novels, and Queer Studies...")
Here's what folks will get (for $50):
Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man by James Cummins and Devid Lehman, illustrated by Archie Rand
Deviant Propulsion by CAConrad
Eunoia by Christian Bök
Saints of Hysteria, edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad
How to Make a Life As A Poet by Gary Mex Glazner
Supermodel by David Breskin
AND, and a limited time bonus, Tremble & Shine by Todd Colby AND God Save My Queen by Daniel Nester!!!
Should you wish to actually order this, click here.
Basically, I suspect this part of the future of independent publishing—in large part because I'm almost certain that as eBook sales pick up in the coming years, a subscription model is by far the most plausible means of delivery. So I figure we should start getting used to it by setting something pretty basic up for the print books, forcing us to proceed slowly along the learning curve.
I wouldn't be me if I didn't have some shot-in-the-dark prognostications as to this, of course, but I'll humbly frame them as questions:
1. Will keeping track of these subscriptions be a nightmare, as if we were trying to run a magazine on top of a publisher? By extension, will our interns hate me?
2. Will people necessarily come to Soft Skull for a subscription, or rather (since I'm pretty sure the answer is a partial yes) what other subscriptions might there be? Obviously retailers might be intersted: could Amazon.com, could Powells.com do something like this?
3. More plausibly even than retailers would be something like the LitBlogCoop...you but a subcription for the four winners, or the 20 finalists?
4. Assuming other parties who are not the publishers but retaling or otherwise filtering how would one negotiate the discounts?
5. For that matter, how will publishers and authors allocate those revenues?
In effect, I have to believe, with the fulfillment aspect of eBooks being relatively straightforward as Digital Rights Management software becomes more turnkey, anyone can become a vendor...
Anyway, will report back to the Soft Skull Blog readers as we develop things here.
There's been a delightful efflusion of poetry presses over the past decade...Slope, Verse (now Wave), (the somewhat lamented) Zoo Press, Tupelo, Fence, Winnow...but it's taken a while longer for fiction publishers to follow. This post is inspired by an e-mail from Jennifer Banash, whose press Impetus has just put up its website which I urge you to check out, following which a visit to Chiasmus, Clear Cut, Suspect Thoughts, Ig Publishing, Demimonde Books would be in order. Also, I'm quietly terrified to do these kinds of posts, because of all the folks I leave out, my apologies in advance...
So we've have three computers die in the past three weeks. [Sigh.] Rustled up the moolah for one replacement (Apple reconditioned e-) Mac but cannot possibly come up with the capital required for another two...So: anyone got an old Mac they're willing to give us in exchange for lots of free books? Doesn't need to be fancy, can even be still on OS9, no princesses here. E-mail me.
Soft Skull's now on MySpace, joining Lisa Crystal Carver and George Tabb, right here.
For some reason we've described ouselves as "Male, 65 years old"...perhaps collectively?
We're delighted to hear that The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers a deeply lovely and gloriously vulgar novel by the gifted Australian Delia Falconer has been shortlisted for Commonwealth Book Prize! A "mixed bag," declares The Complete Review, [NOTE: refering to the list, not refering to our novel, our novel being a genius bag, of course] but we're just happy to see one of ours in there (it publishes in the US in late April...).
This inspires me to mention a superb article by Sydney Morning Herald's Literary Editor, Malcolm Knox. The basic spiel being:
The article discusses Delia Falconer and Cormac McCarthy as examples of literary fiction...Nice company to be in.
Finally, a sample of the deliciousness or download a nice chunk...
At the river he sees five tortoises, eyes eternal and unblinking, lined up along a muddy tree root. A sharp urge to follow his young self as he dives into this same water, the hot sun carried in upon his shoulders, his sturdy heart enjoying its brief stillness—to follow his own slick mammal stream back up to the surface, tight bubbles clinging to the hair upon his thighs.
When he received that last note that Custer sent—Bring Pacs—his first thought, even as he caught a glimpse of Reno’s troops, was that the bastard couldn’t even spell it.
At the trial afterward, they had all remarked upon his own calmness, urged his promotion, made it clear how, in spite of Custer’s note to join him, time and land had closed between him and the hope of getting bullets to the rest.
He watches as his shadow turns before him, skims along the bank. The tortoises, as one, drop into the water.
He thinks, how small the river is.
It has never been much more than a path to the gristmill, no great and mythic passage here; some premonition his father must have had, about the Benteen name.
For a while he thinks of nothing but such bitter symbols for his life.
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.
A rather surreal development, in which Tim Wise's White Like Me has an unusual cameo
DELAND -- Some women on the Stetson University softball team donned basketball jerseys, painted themselves black, wore cornrows and fake gold teeth and flashed "gangsta" poses for pictures that ended up on the Internet, all in the name of Halloween.They say they didn't know they were tapping into an ugly chapter of American history, that of 19th century actors performing in blackface.
"I find it offensive, objectionable and sad," said Leonard Nance, dean of first-year students and chairman of the Diversity Committee. "This is not behavior that we condone. It goes against every principle we believe in."
Members of the men's basketball team loaned the softball players their practice jerseys. Softball players wore the costumes Oct. 29 to a contest at a DeLand bar, where they met up with some of the basketball players, the softball team said in a statement published Thursday in The Recorder, the Stetson student newspaper.
Three softball players dressed as black basketball players; four dressed as white basketball players.
Softball players said they were dressing as individual basketball players, not as black caricatures.
"We had (the basketball players') permission and help," the statement reads. ". . . They thought the costumes were great."
Wylie Tucker, an assistant men's basketball coach, said his players were surprised to learn of the controversy.
"The players felt that the (softball players') intentions were not offensive," he said. "Rather, they were elated that people thought enough of them to try to be like them."
None of the softball team's 16 players pictured on the school's Web site are black. Eight of the 14 men's basketball players are black. About 4 percent of the school's enrollment is black.
The school is requiring both squads to meet with the Diversity Committee, watch a documentary that addresses blackface and read the book "White Like Me," by Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist who recently spoke on campus.
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.)
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.
As forewarned, we're also going to be using this blog to let you know about forthcoming books for which, in many cases, we're also making sample chapter downloads available. Herewith some of our forthcoming political non-fiction (and both authors, Mark Ames and Nasrin Alavi, will guest blog here, Mark at the beginning and Nasrin towards the end of November).
Going Postal examines the phenomenon of rage murder that took America by storm in the early 1980's and has since grown yearly in body counts and symbolic value. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Mark Ames is able to juxtapose the historical place of rage in America with the social climate after Reaganomics began to effect worker's paychecks. But why high schools? Why post offices? Mark Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn't--and doesn't pay--what it used to.
You can download a sample chapter and check out Mark's recent interview on Alternet.org
Plus it's available now online and in most fine bookstores (sadly not every bookstore in the US always carries all our books...)
A book that's not quite yet available (officially publishes at the beginning of December, though it should be available by early November online) is Nasrin Alavi's We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. This has been mentioned by Laila over at MoorishGirl and is the subject of a great piece by Newsweek's Middle Eastern correspondent entitled "Writing Lolita in Tehran."
Download here.
