A few weeks ago, Bruce Goldstein took some time off from his freelance gig writing advertorials for Hearst about the intersection of fashion and the automotive design world to meet me for lunch and talk about his memoir, Puppy Chow Is Better Than Prozac. The book recounts Goldstein's worst bipolar episodes, his initial therapy sessions, and the arrival into his life of Ozzy, a black Labrador puppy whose presence gradually creates a grounding influence.

Goldstein actually landed what Publisher's Marketplace would describe as "a good deal" for this story from a major publisher back in 1997, "a lot of money for a punk from Staten Island who had never written anything," he recalls. When that contract fell apart over what he described as editorial differences, "I couldn't pack it in."

continued...

People love The Mountain Goats because all their songs contain SAT vocab words and are like little stories. So it's unsurprising that John Darnielle can also work up some music-free compositions, like his contribution to Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books inspired by classic albums, a novel about Black Sabbath's 'Master of Reality.' He also recently wrapped up a stint of guest blogging at Powell's excellent blog, which is worth revisiting if you're curious about his feelings about heavy metal (he likes it! and is very knowledgable about it!). And if you live in New York, you can come to a reading of the Black Sabbath book next Saturday at Housing Works and witness his non-singing talents in person.

Count on David Sedaris to sidestep the whole thorny memoir-truth issue with humor. When 'When You Are Engulfed In Flames'comes out next month, it "will carry a short preface, labeling the contents 'real-ish.'" I guess I've always thought that if 97 percent of the story is true, then that's an acceptable formula," he told the Christian Science Monitor.

Sedaris goes on to say that "we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it's not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they'd spent on that book. We're in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones."

The issue of how long someone whose sales were predicated on sympathy and trust spent in jail might not seem like a "small lie" to everyone, of course, but yeah, it's not a WMD-level whopper. So I guess I, like, 97% agree with Sedaris.

"I wouldn't say that birds are Jewish," Jonathan Rosen said, with some light chuckling from the audience, during the Q&A portion of his lecture at the John Templeton Foundation's inaugural book forum earlier this week. Elaborating on the question, he emphasized that the condition birds spoke to, the one that inspired the questioning comparison—"we do not know exactly where we belong, where our native ground is, where our homes are"—was, particularly in the early 21st century, more universal in scope. Other questions from the audience were more playful: "Are there bagel-eating pigeons riding the A train into Manhattan?" Rosen responded in disbelief to one such query.

continued...

After reading a recent GalleyCat post that described In the Belly of the Beast, this year's Lexus Original Fiction Series project, as "a matter of branding gone wrong," Mark Haskell Smith (left), who came up with the concept for the serial novel and recruited the nine authors who will be taking part, emailed me suggesting that evaluation was unfair. "Is it more or less wrong than Spike Lee directing a film for Nokia?" Smith asked rhetorically. "Is it more or less wrong than Oprah Winfrey choosing a novel for her show... or Starbucks picking a book to sell in their stores?"

(Full disclosure: Not only am I friendly with Smith, but Channel V Media, which represents Story Worldwide, the "brand storytelling" firm behind Lexus's print and online magazines, is also my PR firm.)

"Lexus did a focus group," Smith says of the serial's origins. "Lexus owners listed travel, food, and reading as their top three leisure activities. So Lexus decided to add some fiction to their magazine... The project was undertaken in the spirit of fun. The writers got to do, basically, whatever they wanted, within minimal guidelines. The guidelines were more about sex, drugs, and drunk driving than selling the vehicle. So here's an opportunity for nine writers to get their writing, bios, and info about their novels out to a million readers. Is that a sellout or a clever use of new media—specialty publishing—to reach readers and maybe sell some books?"

continued...

If you thought Sloane Crosley's publicist Melissa Broder had it pretty weird, imagine being God's publicist. Matt Staggs is the "humble servant and messenger of God," aka Pushcart Prize winner Thomas M. Disch who declared himself to be God in 2005. With the July publication of Disch's first novel in nine years The Word of God coming up from Tachyon, he's begun answering questions from the faithful on live journal.

"As God's publicist, I can tell you that I have to be on my "A" game." Says Staggs. " If you've read any of God's prior bestselling works (particularly the Old Testament), you know that he can be a tough and demanding client. I'm hoping that he'll be giving me a staff that turns into a snake, or at least some good pull-quotes with which I can woo the media. Either would be sufficient!"

You may recall Monday's blind item from the former assistant to a "top-notch" African-American novelist, who said that the woman in question had one berated him in class for allegedly trying to derail her career. Well, a day went by and nobody guessed right, so Keith Josef Adkins decided to tell a more detailed version of the story on his Blogspot blog, giving the author the 'fake' name of "Xem Tilson Fartier," which is a reasonable indication that he's talking about Xam Wilson Cartiér, the author of Be-Bop, Re-Bop and Muse-Echo Blues.

If you guessed somebody else (like I did), you can probably be forgiven: Cartiér seems to have dropped off the literati's radar more than a decade ago, so if some guy comes around and says "I was an assistant to a famous African-American novelist who was published by Random House," I doubt she'd be the first, second, or even third name to pop into your head. But as long as we're here, anybody know what happened to her?

Michael Chabon showed up for the creative writing program at University of California-Irvine in the mid-1980s with a head full of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme... but also J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Ursula K. LeGuin. The plan, he told me as we chatted in a hotel bar last week, was to write "intensely literary fiction that was equally steeped in genre," but he soon found that his classmates were completely befuddled and unwilling to critique the stories he was submitting. "I didn't want to get into a fight every time I presented a story," he recalled, so he wound up writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which ultimately became his debut novel, as an attempt at working within the traditional coming-of-age genre. "In a way, it was a kind of retreat," he admits, "and I've been... sneaking out at first, but now more clearly into the place I always wanted to be."

That place is exemplified by The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a detective story set in an alternate history where, after the Second World War, a Jewish colony was established in Alaska rather than the Middle East. Less than a week before our meeting, the novel had received a Nebula from the Science Fiction Writers of America; later that night, Chabon would find out whether he'd be able to add an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America to his trophy shelf. (For the record, John Hart wound up winning.) And I'd invited to our conversation a writer who knew exactly what it was like to have the same book up for both awards: Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass.

continued...

It turns out that yesterday's blind item, in which a former assistant to a major African-American novelist recounts the indignities he suffered under her wing, isn't as clearcut as I originally thought. Over at Tayari Jones's blog, and in email backchannels some guesses are being made, with three very viable candidates (and little clarity) emerging. In the meantime, Jones shares her own stories from the assistant life:

"I won't say too much about my experiences, but I will say that it is a hard and personal job... I don't look back at my time as a writers assistant as the happiest time of my life, but I am glad I did it. Although the publishing world has on a few occaisions shown me nastiness that caught me by surprise, my assistant years gave me, at the very least, a glimpse of what was to come and I've done my best to be ready for it."

Would now be a good time to plug Kate Christensen's debut novel, In the Drink? I believe it would be. Also, if you've got stories of literary assistant hell, by all means, share them with us in the comments sections, with as much or as little identifying detail as you care to reveal.

When Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta in the 1990s to be with her new husband, novelist Amitav Ghosh, "Americans weren't very popular," she recalls. "Everyone was very nice, but there was a lot of suspicion." One friendly haven she found was in the home of Tarapada Roy, a writer who had known Allen Ginsberg when the poet made his pilgrimage to India thirty years earlier. In a way, Baker reflects, "Ginsberg had made it a little easier for one to be an American in India."

(Baker and her husband are stiil spending time in Calcutta and Brooklyn, even more so in the years since Baker left her career in book publishing (she was last a nonfiction editor at Little, Brown "four years ago, it might even be five") and still more as their children approach college age.)

The thought stayed with her, and, years later, she tracked down the history of Ginsberg and other Beat writers' travels to India and turned those stories into A Blue Hand. After spending six months writing the proposal, Baker says ("that's the hardest part, trying to figure out how to tell the story"), she submitted it to Penguin Press on a Friday, and had an offer the following Monday. She was given nearly two years to deliver a final manuscript, but wound up handing it in seven months early.

continued...