When Michael Ian Black, author of My Custom Van, announced his feud with David Sedaris, I wanted to get to the bottom of things and asked him for the reasons behind it. Here's what he had to say:

David Sedaris has spent the last decade gaming the best-seller lists, which doesn't seem fair. There are literally NO OTHER memoirists out there who have cracked the best-seller lists because David Sedaris is hogging every single spot. (Augusten Burroughs, James Frey, Chelsea Handler, and all other best-selling memoirists excluded). I see myself as the Rocco Mediate to his Tiger Woods. I am standing up for all of the journeyman literary humorist/essayists out there just trying to claw our way onto the leader board alongside Mr. Sedaris. And to think that he's doing all of this from FRANCE??? It's mind-boggling. Where does he get off writing about stuff while living in France? That's soooo early-to-mid 20th century. Why does he get to live the glamorous life of an ex-pat while the rest of us are in the greatest country in the world, the United States of America, just struggling to pay the bills? Why does he get to eat unflavored yogurt and crepes loaded with Nutella and bananas while real Americans are choking down Chicken McNuggets and microwave popcorn? It's wrong. It's un-American and it's wrong. I'll even take it a step further: it's not just un-American. It's anti-American. He's happy to take American dollars from over here and spend them in cute French patisseries; in a sense, he is using the greatest currency in the world, the United States of America dollar, to subsidize a country that didn't even want to invade Iraq! And he seems completely unapologetic about that fact. You asked why I am doing this? I can give you the answer to that question with one word: The United States of America.

I've reached out to Sedaris' publicist at Little, Brown but have yet to receive an official response. Meanwhile, Black just announced a contest on his blog to Transform Sedaris into a super-villian.

Michael Ian Black, author of My Custom Van: And 50 other mind-Blowing Essays that will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face is endorsed by Amy Sedaris ("Enjoy the ride of your lifetime") but is gunning for her brother David. Since Black realized that his book is currently higher ranked on Amazon.com than David Sedaris's 1994 book Barrel Fever, Black's begun a "desperate bid to dismantle that mo-fo David Sedaris's lock on all things 'best-selling,'" Most importantly he wonders "Why does David Sedaris hate America?" (Sedaris lives in France)

In Black's laugh-out-loud collection of short comic essays from Simon Spotlight Entertainment (which includes an introduction from Abraham Lincoln) he throws down the gauntlet with the essay 'Hey David Sedaris - Why Don't You Just Go Ahead and Suck It?' He now continues the fued online with several Sedaris blogs at the moment including
Some Ways to Casually Put Down David Sedaris at Your Next Social Event Without Looking Like a Total Jerk which includes this gem:

Say, for example, you are at league bowling night and your buddy finds himself facing an easy pick-up for a spare. Just before he bowls say something like, "Don't miss, Bob, or you might hear David Sedaris telling a long and humorous story about what a boob you are on 'This American Life.'"

I wonder if Black noticed that customers on Amazon that bought My Custom Van also bought Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames but not the other way around?

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani pans Salman Rushdie's latest novel... again. It appears as if she hasn't liked anything he's done since The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995 which she called "a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel." After reading through the archives at the NYT, I see that Kakutani admires the man and as late as 1996, was calling him "the real thing." What happened? As far as I can tell, nothing Rushdie has published recently has lived up to the seminal novels she fell in love with in the 80's and 90's.

From today's Review:

Salman Rushdie's new novel, "The Enchantress of Florence," reads less like a novel by the author of such magical works as "Midnight's Children" and "The Moor's Last Sigh" than a weary, predictable parody of something by John Barth. Such talk about sorcery and mysterious doubles isn't delivered here with the sort of dazzling sleight of hand that have made Mr. Rushdie's most powerful work, like the most powerful work of Gabriel García Marquez, so mesmerizing and so phantasmagorical. Rather it's lacquered onto a plywood story with a heavy paintbrush that leaves lots of streaks and spots and results in a work that feels jerry-built, meretricious - and yes, quite devoid of magic.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception is all over the news today as the White House reacts to its contents. Since the book isn't on sale till June 2, the media blitz is driving everyone to Amazon.com, making it the #1 book on their sales ranking, knocking The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch out of the top spot. It will be interesting to see if the media blitz keep this book moving next week when it finally hits the stores.

23/6 has a great recap of all the headlines here including my favorite from the Thaindian News, "McClellen Hits on President Bush."

BookLocker.com has filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon.com in response to Amazon's recent attempts to force all publishers using Print on Demand (POD) technology to pay Amazon to print their books. You can read the complaint here and Booklocker.com Publisher Angela Hoy has detailed the issues at stake and the downside of signing a contract for POD with Amazon here. According to Hoy, she hasn't heard a peep out of Amazon since their official statement back in March, however, she says:

We know from off-the-record conversations we've had with other POD publishers that they are still soliciting signed contracts from those publishers so... it's quite obvious they're not backing down.

Why is Amazon so quiet? Well according to the Seattle Times "Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith said Wednesday the company does not comment on active litigation."

You can read our past coverage of this story here.

Karen Knows Best just alerted me to news that after two years, Millenia Black resolved her lawsuit against Penguin. At issue was that once Penguin bought her self-published The Great Pretender and discovered that Millenia was black, they wanted to market it as an African American title, even though her romance novel featured white characters.

According to Karen, "Millenia argued that being categorised as an AA author, would limit her sales potential, as her book would be shelved in the AA literature section, rather than the general lit section. Penguin ignored her, so she was left with no other choice, but to sue."

On her blog, Black writes "I'm very pleased to share that the matter has now been resolved to my satisfaction through an agreement, the terms of which can never be discussed. In the interest of my blog's archival integrity, I fully disclose that all previous discussions about the case have been removed. There will be no further information about the lawsuit on my blog."

It appears two terms of the resolution were to purge all mentions of the suit on her blog, and never to discuss it again. This is an unfortunate side effect of the digital publishing age where you can erase a history, or even rewrite it. I would have liked to read this story from the beginning on her blog.

In Marietta GA, Mulligan Food & Spirits owner, Mike Norman was selling "Obama in '08" t-shirts depicting Curious George eating a banana on them. According to the AJC:

Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey. "We're not living in the (19)40's," he said. "Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears -- he looks just like Curious George."

"This isn't the first time Curious George has been dragged into the current presidential race," reports the Boston Herald. "Earlier this year, loudmouth radio jock Rush Limbaugh apologized on air for laughing at a caller's comment that her daughter thought Obama looked like Curious George."

Houghton Mifflin, which owns the rights to Curious George finally issued this official statement on the racial debacle:

"We have seen the news reports of a local bar owner in Marietta, GA allegedly selling T-shirts that depict the Curious George character in a racially insensitive manner. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is the owner of copyright and trademark rights associated with Curious George, did not, nor would we under any circumstances, authorize or approve such a use, which we find offensive and utterly out of keeping with the values Curious George represents. We are monitoring the situation and weighing our options with respect to possible legal action."

While I don't see any pending Obama children's books, there are over a dozen adult titles coming up between now and election including my favorite sounding title: Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle: 366 Ways He Really Cares by Mathew Honan

Photo Cred: Frank Niemeir/AJC

Jim Knipfel's recent Slackjaw article, The Statistics of Contempt, has the Brooklyn stroller set in a tizzy. "You know, I've been writing this column for almost 22 years now, and while I've received plenty of reaction to this or that piece over the years, I can't remember anything like this - at least not since the early days," says Knipfel. "People are such sad, scary creatures." Knipfel's next book (title tba) to be released by Simon and Schuster next April includes a subplot in which the protagonist is terrorized by "a murderous army of stroller pushers." When Knipfel's agent first began pitching the book, she told him she was afraid that parents in publishing would be mortified by the anti-stroller sentiment and it could be a tough sell. Fortunately, it appears S&S has a sense of humor about it.

This ongoing stroller battle which began with the now infamous manifesto and made the New York Times back in February when the slope bar Union Hall tried to ban strollers takes place in publishing's back yard. There seems to be an anti-baby movement simmering in publishing (could it be the childless can't take something akin to maternity leave?) so I reached out to the experts at Take Back the Island which was founded by two publishing folk to get their take on things:

"A murderous army of stroller pushers is not fiction to anyone who has ever had the misfortune of daring to be a single person trying to dodge overzealous mothers in Park Slope or any other part of the rapidly-expanding suburb that is New York City. While trendy New York parenting has been written about, the only voices weighing in are the pretentious parents themselves, like Amy Sohn and Adam Gopnik.

We think it's about time for literature to show these annoying, self-absorbed parents for who they really are. We at Take Back the Island are taking suggestions for what should be the first book to be chosen for the TBTI book club."

Maybe their first book should be France's bestselling No Kid: 40 Reasons Not To Have Children by Corinne Maier.
I'd love to see Corinne Maier have a reading at Union Hall and then read all the comments about it on Brownstoner.

At a fundraiser for writers' retreat Sangam House, Rick Moody got cold, whipped-creamy revenge for the 2002 review in which Dale Peck called him "the worst writer of his generation." Moody didn't pie Peck gently, either -- he really put his arm into it, and then smeared it around after making contact.

This is cute and all, but there's a chummy, clubby aspect of the 'reconciliation' that bothers me. Does Peck really take back everything he ever said about, say,'The Black Veil?' Does he still care fervently about literature and how it's marketed, or is he just spending his free time swimming around in a vault full of money a la Scrooge McDuck now that his sci-fi project with the dude from Heroes sold for $3 million? Also, I feel that this establishes a dangerous precedent. Well, I am not about to get pied, not even to support the worthiest writer's retreat imaginable.

Last night at a Harvard event with fellow New Yorker staff writer James Wood, Jonathan Franzen said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times." Franzen was of course refering to Pulitzer-Prize winning reviewer Michiko Kakutani, who, according to the New York Observer,

presumably got on Mr. Franzen's bad side with her brutal review of his recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone. In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: "there is something oddly preening about [Franzen's] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable." Also: "Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen's unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen's mind remains something of a mystery."

But is Kakutani really the stupidest person in New York City?
Let's see how they stack up and you can decide after the jump

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