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June 2007
June 01, 2007
Scenes from Provincial Life II
I believe it was called Think.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 2007
May 31, 2007
Set Up
I got the idea, made notes on the Holtzbrink operational chart, and dashed up the hall to the Chris Anderson panel . . .
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 30, 2007
Judging a Book by its Title
Timothy Schaffert, author of The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God and the new novel Devils in the Sugar Shop, wrote at Booksquare last week about his original title for Devils... and why he ultimately changed it.
Posted in: Authors Blog,
May 29, 2007
BEA
Like everyone else in this business, we’re headed toward the Javits Center tomorrow for Book Expo America. We’re bringing a few authors along . . . .
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 24, 2007
The Trifling Trinomial
by M. Allen Cunningham
You might have noticed I publish under the slightly cryptic author name of “M. Allen Cunningham,” and you wouldn’t be the first if you happened to wonder why I went with this moniker.
Posted in: Authors Blog,
May 22, 2007
The right to an opinion
It seems to me that the blogging response to Richard Schickel’s piece in the L. A. Times has been admirably restrained. How easy it would be to fly off the handle at a class warrior who can and does decry the arrival of “hairy-chested populism” in the pages of a daily newspaper; such a critic reveals himself at the turn of his every phrase, and most every phrase is assailable.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 15, 2007
EWN interview with Andrea Portes
Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network recently interviewed Andrea Portes about her novel, HICK.
Posted in: Authors Blog,
May 15, 2007
Only Remarking
On the way out of town on Saturday morning, I picked up a copy of Michael Chabon’s ubiquitous new novel.
Have you seen the cover? Forget the cover; have you seen the spine?
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 08, 2007
Review inches, wampeters, and blogjams
The present verbal friction between traditional print-media reviewers and the lit-bloggers seems to me a distraction from the real problem we all face together.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 08, 2007
The End of the World as We Know It, Coming Soon!
by William J. Cobb
So I’ve just read these two books about “the coming oil crisis” – Powerdown and The Long Emergency. They both predict a running-on-empty apocalypse, a future right around the corner in which cheap oil will dry up and we’ll return to a neofeudal society in which the most of us will become farmers, if we’re lucky, hoeing gardens peacefully until the food runs out and we descend into mud-wrestling over turnips. I don’t quite buy it . . . yet.
Posted in: Authors Blog,
May 01, 2007
M’aidez
Much has justifiably been written recently on the constricting changes in newspaper book review coverage — changes at The Raleigh News & Observer, the Chicago Tribune, the L. A. Times, last year at The Dallas Morning News, and in too many other papers. We hear rumors of more such changes to come.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
May 01, 2007
Harvard Coop Event with Marc Estrin and Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago Law School, became the object of Alan Krieger’s affection in his golemic search for the perfect woman. So, with her permission, I wrote his lust, and her parry into Golem Song.
Posted in: Authors Blog,
April 2007
April 24, 2007
Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo and Blair
A few weeks ago I spoke to a university class called Introduction to Publishing. I talked assertively, right out loud from behind a low table, just as though I believed this industry to be in any way controllable or predictable.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
April 17, 2007
as the swallow
There is little that should be said today in this circumscribed forum. But I have been thinking this: T. S. Eliot’s line about April is only a depressive’s assertion about baseless hope and the melding of desire with sad memory. It is nothing more than that. It is not a metaphysical observation.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
April 10, 2007
Chaotic attractors
We might be able to save a great deal of heartache, ink, paper, and bitter anticipation were there available to us a Chaos Theory of Readership.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
April 05, 2007
Hick
I acquired Hick, not just for the story, but for the sound of the first-person narrative, which surprises me. To a great many new writers, first-person seems the easiest way to tell a story, but it is by far the most difficult to pull off with authenticity.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,
March 2007
March 20, 2007
The law of attraction
Someone surprised me last week by asking why it is that I think the publishing industry is so threatened and the publishing future so dark. What surprised me most about the question was that it apparently arose from a reading of this blog.
Posted in: Publishers Blog,