Authors

In this candid video interview, novelist John Irving confessed that his first novel, "Setting Free The Bears," would not be published in our 21st Century publishing industry.

In a new Big Think interview, he explained: "If I were twenty-seven and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself...I think it's a lot tougher to be a first [time] novelist, to be an unknown novelist today than it was for me and so I worry about what's going to happen with those good, younger writers. But I don't think the book is in any particular peril, I think the book is going to survive."

The quote was part of a simple series of interviews with the novelist, each broken into easily digestible segments. Among other topics, he covered how writers should think about movies and why he can't leave the United States.

Novelist Philip Roth curiously cut out a reference to Lansing, Michigan in his thirtieth novel, excising a location a half-hour away from this GalleyCat editor's hometown.

The NY Observer painstakingly compared a review copy of "The Humbling" against the final copy sold in bookstores, uncovering this geographical slight: "[In the first draft] Pegeen's father runs a community theater in the capital of Michigan, a place for which Mr. Roth apparently has little love: 'Lansing, Michigan' is changed to 'middle of nowhere.'"

This editorial action tested our affection for Roth's work, since this GalleyCat editor actually covered indie theater in Lansing for his community college newspaper. Saddened by Roth's editorial exorcism, GalleyCat would like to salute all the writers, reviewers, readers, and community theater supporters in Lansing, Michigan. You are not forgotten!

"I think it's usually a good time to write a book when you go to the library or the bookstore and the book you want to read isn't there," explained Michael Meyer in that video interview. He's the author of the book, "The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,"and shared some simple, powerful advice for aspiring creative nonfiction writers.

Meyer was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards last week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author: "The Minnesota native has lived for the past two of his 10 years in China in one of the courtyard neighborhoods - called hutong - first settled 800 years ago, whose narrow lanes run mazelike through the center of Old Beijing."

Author John Grisham bashed Amazon and Walmart in a Today Show appearance, criticizing how the companies have marked down books and made the market more difficult for "aspiring writers."

As we reported, Walmart (WMT) recently slashed book prices online, slashing the cover price of the top 10 pre-selling titles to $10 apiece--sweetening the deal with free shipping. This move touched off a book discounting war in between Amazon.com (AMZN), Walmart, and finally, Target (TGT). At one point, prices sank below $9 for a new hardcover.

Here's more from Grisham (pictured, via), from the article: "[The price] enables me to make a royalty, the publisher to make a profit and the bookstore to make a profit ... If a new book is worth $9, we have seriously devalued that book ... It's a free market--there's no legal case ... I'm not itching to sue Amazon or Wal-Mart...they sell a lot of books. But the future is very uncertain with books."

On Meet the Press this weekend, author Jon Krakauer made headlines for criticizing the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan for the role he played after the death of football star and soldier, Pat Tillman.

During the show, Krakauer (pictured, via) debates why Gen. Stanley McChrystal helped give a "fraudulent" medal to Tillman after the star died in a friendly-fire incident. In the video, the author watches a clip of the General explaining why he gave the medal to the football star--an event that Krakauer studies in his new book, "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman."

Here's more from the article: "He, he just said now he didn't read this hugely important document about the most famous soldier in the military. He didn't read it carefully enough to notice that it talked about enemy fire instead of friendly fire? That's preposterous. That, that's not believable." (Via Huffington Post)

Walter Kirn gives mediabistro.com members the inside story on expanding an essay he wrote for The Atlantic in Lost in the Meritocracy, a memoir of his "undereducation of an overachiever," in the latest installment of the "Hey, How'd You...?" series. "After I wrote the essay, I had a sizable response in the letters of personal outpourings," he recalls. "Everyone, it seemed, had been less happy than they were supposed to be and less well educated than they were pretending to be." So he set out to write something bigger, but realized that all those experiences he had weren't enough in and of themselves: "You think when you sit down to write a memoir that you have a story to tell because you have yourself and what happened to you, but that doesn't make a character in a story... You can't just record a sequence of events and have a narrative," he explains. "The conventions of storytelling are even more important when you're telling a real story than when you're telling a made-up one."

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UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design blog, alerts us to a ceiling collapse at Homestead, the house in which Emily Dickinson lived as a small child and famously spent the last three decades of her adult life, writing poems. According to a report in the NY Times, the plaster ceiling in the front parlor appears to have dropped so low from visitors' regard Sunday afternoon that they heard it hit the ground. (The house is part of the Emily Dickinson Museum and was open for tours; no injuries were reported.)

In a conversation at the 10-day International Festival of Authors, award-winning author Alice Munro (pictured, via) revealed a recent battle with health problems.

Here's more from The Canadian Press: "Munro said she's had heart bypass surgery and 'just had cancer.' Still, Munro said she's 'been lucky with her health,' unlike her mother, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at a relatively young age and died in her late 50s."

Recently the author took herself out of the running for the $50,000 Giller Prize, which she has won twice during her career. Last year she won the £60000 Man Booker International Prize, chosen out of a longlist that included 14 writers from 12 different countries. (Via Writer's Blog)

As children around the world build wizard costumes for Halloween, a British woman canceled her Harry Potter themed-party after receiving a disproving letter from Warner Brothers' lawyers.

According to the Telegraph, a woman (who goes by the pseudonym Ms. Marmite Lover in the article), has hosted a few themed dinner parties at her home. While planning a party about J.K. Rowling's famous wizard, complete with talking paintings and pumpkin soup, the hostess received this letter from legal and business department: "While we are delighted you are such a fan of the Harry Potter series, unfortunately your proposed use of the Harry Potter properties... without our consent would amount to an infringement of Warner's rights."

The party will continued, now dubbed "Generic Wizard Night." In a London Evening Standard interview, the host explained her dinner series: "The night is totally a fan's tribute and is a one-off. It's not like I'm running a permanent Harry Potter restaurant...It is basically dinner parties that are paid for. I'm the cook and hostess. Each dinner takes four days of work and I make very little money from it."

When we met with Frank Portman to talk about his second YA novel, Andromeda Klein, we joked that it was a banned book waiting to happen... (Little did we know that, no joke, one school in Portland had already cancelled his appearance because of the book's occult themes.)

Portman told us a bit about the tarot imagery that permeates the novel, which centers on a teenage girl (and practicing ceremonial magician) still coping with the death of her friend, and we went from there to talking about the accuracy of the story's handling of occultism in general. "I thought I knew a lot about it when I started," Portman admitted, "but I still had to do all kinds of research. It was a crazy odyssey... To write a novel about an obsessive character like Andromeda, you have to know a lot." Rather than simply use the magic as a framing device or a plot point, he strove to make it both integral to the narrative and absolutely real—but in a way that still allows skeptical readers to accept what happened to Andromeda as manifestations from her own subconscious fueled by her voracious reading on the subject.

Andromeda's efforts to preserve the occult section of her town's public library are a major part of the story, and Portman was quick to point out how much reading and book collecting shapes modern-day magick. "Everybody in that world is very proud of their collection," he said; the rarer the books, the better. "It's a lot like record collecting."

Speakng of record collecting, Andromeda Klein has a theme song (complete with references to Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft), which is also available as a 7-inch single. For the longest time, he revealed, he wasn't sure what his character's main name was. "Her name came to me while I was standing in line for bagels, and as soon as I thought the name, I had the tune for the song—all sorts of answers about her personality came from that."