Browse GalleyCat October 2006 archives - GalleyCat

Scene @ Jack’s Widow Party

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 11:22:09 +0000

PR chief (and Lunch at Michael’s regular) Peter Brown threw a reception at his Central Park West digs last night to welcome Eve Pollard, the former editor of London’s Sunday Mirror and Sunday Express, and celebrate the American publication of her novel Jack’s Widow, which depicts Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a CIA intelligence asset and agent. After spotting Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff and HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman in the foyer, I caught up with Pollard, happily chatting with NYT writer Alex Witchel. Witchel explained to me that one of her first jobs in journalism was as Pollard’s assistant when she launched Elle twenty years ago; she also revealed that she’s quite close to completing her own second novel (after 2002′s Me Times Three).

Although the mood at the party was thoroughly festive, the initial response to Pollard’s novel has been less than elated. Yesterday’s Page Six contained an item about the Kennedy clan’s displeasure (incorrectly identifying the book as a HarperCollins title rather than William Morrow, and then as always forgetting to mention the Post’s corporate connection to the publishing house), while Washington Post thriller critic Patrick Anderson slammed the book as a “ghoulish piece of trash.” On the other hand, Sherryl Connelly at the NY Daily News thought the book was “an altogether tantalizing could-have-been” that “expertly weaves the facts of Jackie’s life into [Pollard's] fiction.” (Which, to be honest, is a rather odd assessment, considering the historical distortions Anderson catches…and the fact that every line of JFK or LBJ’s dialogue in the scenes I read on the subway home sounded less like Kennedy or Johnson than like stilted British functionaries. Which was a bit disappointing, as I was totally set to run with the premise…I mean, c’mon, Jackie O as spy? That’s thriller gold you’re working with!)

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Finally, a Fake Writer We Can Admire!

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:00:11 +0000

Rohan Kriwaczek (right), whose An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin has charmed publishing observers on both sides of the Atlantic with the sheer thoroughness of its hoax, dropped in on McNally Robinson a few days ago to check the store out before tonight’s “concert appearance,” where he’ll be playing the violin as well as taking questions about the book. The funny thing is, after some bookseller in Iowa went to all the trouble of figuring out the con, a blog purporting to be by the director of Leipzig’s MuseumZeitraum makes an effort to restore the patina of authenticity, claiming that the history “debunked” as fake is in fact real.

Well, the museum seems to exist…at first. But a little more searching on Google turns up evidence this is yet another hoax, and a very elaborate one at that. Seriously, I haven’t seen a pledge this elaborate since my visit to LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was the subject of Lawrence Weschler’s delightful Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Now the question is: Are these two separate fantabulist schemes, or one big one?

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Obama Not Quite So Goody Two-Shoes?

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:17:21 +0000

Peter Osnos was the publisher at Times Books back in the 1990s when literary agent Jane Dystel approached the house about a memoir by one of her clients, a Harvard law school grad named Barack Obama. That, as you might recall, led to the publication of Dreams of My Father in 1995. Well, Osnos has kept track of his young author, who of course has gone on to tremendous political and publishing success since Crown revived Dreams two years ago, and what bothers him about that steady upward climb is Obama’s decision to dump Dystel as his agent and hire Robert Barnett, the attorney who handles literary affairs for just about everybody on the DC A-list, then cutting a seven-figure book deal with Crown before being sworn into the U.S. Senate…in other words, before the income would require public disclosure.

While recognizing that Obama’s business decision is “completely legal and entirely within his rights as a writer,” Osnos is still disappointed at how quickly the senator has cashed in on his high-profile arrival on the political scene. “I just wish that this virtuous symbol of America’s aspirational class did not move quite so smoothly into a system of riches as a reward for service,” Osnos observes, “especially before it has actually been rendered.”

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Telling Tales for Fun and Profit

Sarah — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 08:49:41 +0000

The LA Times’ Johanna Neuman reports on an increasing trend of Washington politicos publishing their memoirs – warts and all, and the warts usually belong to other people. These days, Neuman writes, book parties have replaced cocktail hours in Washington social circles, and power is no longer measured in proximity to the Oval Office but in phone time with Bob Barnett, book agent for Bob Woodward and other aspiring political literary stars. Things have gotten so bad that the 8 a.m. staff meetings at the White House have reportedly gone chilly, with participants reluctant to express their views for fear someone at the table is taking notes or planning revenge—by the book.

“Everybody now has to think whenever they say anything about how it will look in the page of a book,” said Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter who is founder and editor at large at PublicAffairs Books. “You’re saying something with the mike open. Is that a deterrent to free speech? Sure, but that’s life.” And expect a whole lot more in the kiss-and-tell front – but also remember that for the glut that appears on shelves, there’s probably ten times that amount that gets turned down before publication’s even possible…

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Soap Opera with a Superhero Twist

Sarah — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 08:36:45 +0000

What with the staggering success of AS THE WORLD TURNS’ 50th anniversary tie-in mystery novel, OAKDALE CONFIDENTIAL, it’s no surprise that Proctor & Gamble, the soap’s parent company, would want to repeat the same deal with its other flagship TV show, GUIDING LIGHT. But not in the way you think. As the NYT’s George Gene Gustines reports, GL has jumped aboard the comics bandwagon by giving longrunning (and long, long-suffering) heroine Harley Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers, left) superpowers—and the results run both on TV (starting tomorrow morning, though a sneak preview is online) and in book form, with an eight-page comic by Alex Chung & Jim McCann, “A New Light,” that debuted last week as a backup feature in select Marvel comics. (Reactions from comics fans have been decidedly mixed, with Ron lending his own two cents to the debate at Newsarama.)

Ellen Wheeler, the executive producer of “Guiding Light,” said the idea for a collaboration came from another Marvel comic book milestone: the July wedding of the Black Panther and Storm, an X-Men character, whose dress was conceived by Shawn Dudley, the costume designer for “Guiding Light.” After that, it was simple: “Let’s call them to see if there’s anything to talk about,” Wheeler said.

Indeed there was, though creating the script for “A New Light” was a balancing act, according to McCann. He said he had to give readers enough information about GL’s characters and also fill them in on Marvel superheroes and villains. “I tried to make it as universal and as accessible as possible for both sides,” McCann said. “I threw in a couple of little things for GUIDING LIGHT fans, so they would know I really did my homework on their show.”

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Spin Control kicks in for Rubenfeld

Sarah — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:54:30 +0000

With the post-mortem on how and why Jed Rubenfeld‘s much-hyped debut novel THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER didn’t meet its expectations now a few weeks old, it’s time for the spin to take over. But since Bookscan reported a 47 percent jump in sales the week the Wall Street Journal article ran – showing that yet again, all publicity is good publicity – maybe there’s something to the AP running its profile of the Yale-based constitutional law professor now, and not beforehand.

And Rubenfeld does give some clue to his future, in that he’s not sure if he’ll write a second novel. He wrote the first draft of “The Interpetation of Murder” in six months because the history and ideas moved him. “This book, this was my way of not doing law,” he says. “I still don’t think I’m really a novelist. … I think that I was able to write this book because it didn’t require someone who was really a novelist.” Then again, maybe it’s spin moving against the grain…

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AP Comes Late to the Pessl Party

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:53:01 +0000

Jed Rubenfeld isn’t the only author the Associated Press has taken its own sweet time getting around to covering. Another story went out over the wire yesterday afternoon profiling Marisha Pessl two months after everybody else had dealt with her—and once again depicting the young writer with the sort of hazy, glowing adulation that Sarah predicted way back when. The funny thing is, for all Mark Kennedy’s claims that Pessl’s “very easy to hate,” what with being young and “book hot” and critically acclaimed, he never bothers to offer up any evidence that anybody hates Pessl beyond a passing acknowledgment that “some have groused that the book is too long and that the second-half thriller seems to come from nowhere.” At least the New York Times tried to fuel the flames a bit in its attempt to imbue Pessl’s otherwise cushy path to publication with some degree of drama.

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Probing YA Writer’s Absence from Borders Shelves

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:30:42 +0000

As FishbowlLA co-editor Kate Coe has discovered, Jim Webb isn’t the only novelist getting grief for racy prose—Veronica Mars writer Aury Wallington has published a young-adult novel called Pop!, and she’s getting some flack for the juicy parts. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that in recognition of Wallington’s contributions as a mediabistro.com instructor, the company’s West Coast office is throwing a book party for Pop! next week.)

Kate reports: Borders, according to a Book Standard column by Jessa Crispin, won’t be stocking the novel. The book, which has enjoyed a generally good critical reception, concerns a seventeen-year-old virgin and her quest to have sex; Wallington wrote it as an homage to Judy Blume’s Forever.

FBLA called Ami Hassler, children’s buyer for Borders Group (we didn’t actually expect to get her on the phone, but sometimes we just get lucky). Hassler told us that Warhol-style covers don’t do well and that a quote attributed to her in Crispin’s coverage was not in reference to Pop!, but rather to another book.

continued…

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She decides what gets stocked at Asda

Sarah — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:01:34 +0000

Though the Bookseller’s feature on head book buyer Steph Bateson ran a few days ago, it’s still very much worth repeating. For how did a 30 year old PhD candidate become one of the biggest players in the UK publishing world? Answer: by joining up with the supermarket chain Asda on a whim and rising through the ranks.

She saw the books buying position advertised internally when Toby Bourne, now at Waterstone’s, was promoted to buying manager of books, news and magazines. “I loved reading”–Paul Auster and Michael Connelly are among her favourite authors–”so I thought I could combine my interests with my job. I was lucky to get it.” There was much to learn. “The books sector is very different from other industries that Asda works with. But Asda needs books to be supplied like every other product in terms of service levels and our distribution framework. So understanding that balance was a challenge. It is still a frustration that books are not simply coming into our depot from publishers when and how we want them, so that we can get them on shelves.”

Bateson is quite open about how Asda fares next to its main competitors, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. “Tesco’s point of sale is brilliant. Sainsbury’s have made good progress this year. W H Smith has too many offers. What we do really well is seizing on new releases, and we are the driving force on price–some publishers don’t like that and some do.” But the changing price points bother her. “I have been asking publishers why a chick lit or crime book is 7.99, and it is because they can get away with it for a brand author. But 99% of the books that are 7.99 we can do without. They are cheating the customer, who is paying a different price for similar books.”

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Marine Corps Memoirist Defends Webb’s Fiction

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:59:37 +0000

After preparing my initial summary of the artificial controversy over Jim Webb’s novels late last night, I glanced over at my bookcase and spotted my copy of Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, which longtime readers may recall I consider one of the best-written memoirs in recent years, and decided to send off an email to the former USMC officer asking if he had any thoughts about Webb’s Fields of Fire. “It’s one of the top two or three iconic books about the Corps,” Fick (right), who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, replied. “I’d venture to guess that 98% of Marine infantry officers have read it—most of them more than once. It’s as good a description as I’ve seen of leadership under fire.”

“This blow-up by George Allen et al is a classic case of those without talent or experience in a particular area attacking those who have it,” Fick added, “go[ing] after others’ strengths to mask your own weaknesses. I hope he gets hit with some serious blowback.” The full political impact won’t be known until next week, but in the meantime, the attack on Webb has had one discernible impact: the paperback edition of Fields of Fire is currently one of Amazon’s top 600 bestsellers. (Sadly, I didn’t think to check on that ranking days ago, when the iron was really hot…)

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NYT Echoes Its Own Aeneid Coverage

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:00:27 +0000

If Charles McGrath’s profile of Robert Fagles (right) in Monday’s NYT arts section seems familiar to you, perhaps it’s because you remember a 2004 article by Chris Hedges which mines much of the same territory, namely Fagles’s work on a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The most striking similarity is Fagles’s repeated description of the epic poem as “a cautionary tale”:

2004: “It is one we need to read today. It speaks of the terrible price of victory in war, for Virgil knew that victory is finally impossible, that it always lies out of reach. He saw the unforeseen aftermath, the way war could all go wrong whether from poor planning or because of the gods on high. He knew the sheer accumulation of death, the destruction, the pain we inflict when we use force to create empire.”

2006: “[It's] about the terrible ills that attend empire—its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both… It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselveslves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

The two articles even mention the same line of Latin, “forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,” which is the real reason I remembered the original article. Fagles was translating the verse as “a joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this” when he spoke to Hedges, but it’s rendered in the McGrath piece as “maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.” (I still prefer my very loose rendition: “And maybe one day we can look back at all this and laugh.” But you’ll notice nobody’s offering me a book deal to translate Virgil.) A quick email to McGrath reveals that he came up with that version, not Fagles; he also throws in another bit of Latin at the end—”vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras”—which he then translates rather nicely as “his spirit, groaning with indignation, escap[ed] to the shades below.”

photo: Laura Pedrick/NYT

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Bypassing the bookstore

Sarah — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:33:29 +0000

Though the Seattle Times’ piece on authors like Mitch Albom going to Starbucks has been done before, of particular interest was the fact that Albom’s day in town, which began by reading to about 600 employees at Starbucks‘ corporate headquarters, then answered questions from more than 250 fans at the Starbucks at Madison Park and finally read again at a candle-lit literary salon at the swanky Palace Ballroom in Belltown, was organized by someone who’s made an entire career out of “out of the box” book events.

“It’s a win-win situation,” said Kim Ricketts, founder and owner of Kim Ricketts Book Events, who organizes authors to do readings at the workplaces of Boeing, Starbucks, Microsoft and public venues in both Seattle and San Francisco. “When I organize an event at, say, Microsoft, those employees get to hear about something they’re interested in. The author gets an audience with a group of people interested in what he’s doing, and the publisher gets a room full of people who are buying books.” And so she has since 2003, putting together corporate events for books of all stripes at a clip of 20 to 30 a month (with a special eye for cookbooks.) But as Ricketts’ business takes off, what does this mean for booksellers, who devote time and energy to lure big names to their stores – also keep on selling their backlist, the real meat of the publishing industry?

“It’s bad business,” Robert Sindelar, manager and buyer at Third Place Books, says of publishers’ endorsement of literary salons. “They’re excited because it’s new and cutting edge, but these events don’t sell their backlist.” Ricketts, not surprisingly, doesn’t think her business overlaps with that of the bookstore. “A lot of people actually need to be reminded they like to read,” she said. “And when I’m able to do that by going to places where people aren’t actively seeking out books, it’s good for everyone. If people start buying more books, where are they going to go? A bookstore, right?”

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“Lit Chick Invasion” Takes Overs KGB

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:20:17 +0000

Novelists Emily Maguire (Taming the Beast), Heather O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals), and Sarah Hall (Haweswater) relax before the official kickoff to Harper Perennial’s “Lit Chick Invasion Tour” last night at the KGB Bar reading series. Perennial threw a pizza party before the reading began, inviting several New York bloggers and publishing types (including both GalleyCats, The Publishing Spot‘s Jason Boog, FSG publicist Ami Greko, Memoirville‘s Rachel Fershleiser and her boss at Smith Magazine, Larry Smith) to meet the authors and their publishing team. The trio will be reading again tonight at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, then heading out to Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco.

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Political Race Turns into Ugly Literary Debate

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:08:48 +0000

Here at GalleyCat, we can usually steer clear of most political hullaballoos and leave them for more appropriate blogs, but the latest twist in the Virginia Senate race between George “Macaca” Allen and James “Jim” Webb has a publishing angle too delicious to ignore. The Washington Post has an excellent summary, which I’ll try to break down even quicker: After failing to get the legitimate media interested in writing about passages in Webb’s novels allegedly demeaning to women, Allen’s campaign staff sent an email to Matt Drudge, and all of a sudden there’s a story. One of Webb’s first responses was to point out that Lynne Cheney put plenty of sexually-tinged material in Sisters, a 1981 novel featuring (as USA Today described it) “brothels, attempted rapes and a lesbian love affair.” Cheney has worked hard to suppress the book, because keeping it out of print is the most effective way to bluff when journalists question her about it, as Wolf Blitzer did on CNN Friday afternoon. (If you’re interested in judging Cheney’s alleged smuttiness for yourself, a PDF version of the novel is still floating around online.)

Over the weekend, Webb came back at Allen, referring to him as part of “a group of unprincipled, small-minded, power-hungry character assassins.” He also observed that Jennifer Allen, the senator’s sister, depicts several instances of her brother’s abusive behavior in her 2000 memoir, Fifth Quarter. Sen. Allen’s response? “People have asked my sister and she said it was a novelization.” At least one attempt to get Jennifer Allen on the record about that characterization has met with failure.

But the real kink in Allen’s argument may well be Webb’s stamp of approval from the United States Marine Corps, which requires every soldier between the ranks of corporal and sergeant to read Fields of Fire, one of the novels Allen’s underlings singled out for attack. In the opinion of the Corps, Webb “conveys the experience of combat with rare lucidity” and “creates a doctrine of combat leadership and a creed for the succeeding generation on how and why Marines fight.”

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WSJ Love Letter to B&N

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:00:43 +0000

To be fair, a significant portion of Jonathan Laing’s enthusiasm for Barnes & Noble builds off the opinion of Pershing Square hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who’s carved out an 8% stake in the bookseller because he’s convinced the company “has weathered the competitive threat of the online book retailer Amazon.com and continues to prosper.” And I realize the whole point of the “Barron’s investment insight” is to describe stocks ripe for the taking. But I mean, really, when you get to passages like “with its Starbucks coffee cafes, frequent author visits and children’s reading hours, it continues to offer customers a far richer experience than Internet book sellers or book clubs can,” you have to ask yourself whether you’re reading an article or a press release. But here’s the nut: “Rising earnings should take the stock up into the mid-50s in a year to 18 months and to double its current price three years out.” (As I prepare this post for publication before the Monday markets open, B&N is currently at 41.07, nearly three points higher than Amazon.)

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