Apparently there's a new Yahoo Group being formed called "The Bastion," which will be, in the words of founder Moshe Feder, "a place for members of the SF, Fantasy, and Horror communities (fans and pros both) to share their love of cats." (The title dervies from Egyptian mythology.) I don't know much more about it than what I read on SFScope, the search function on Yahoo Groups being unhelpful, but that sounds like the sort of thing the GalleyCat Army could get behind...

It also reminds me that I haven't run an open call for your cat photos since last December—and since I'm going out of town later this week on a speaking engagement, now's a good time to bulk up! You know the drill: Authors (published or at the very least with a book deal in place), bookstore owners, and other publishing industry pros are invited to send in pictures of their cats—preferably doing something cute, ideally with a book or a manuscript or anything literary in the image, and definitely with a backstory to go with it. Any questions? Consult the archives.

This time around, let's cast the net wide; even if your cat's been featured before, if you've got a new photo and new news, we'll take a look. But, please, just cats this week; as always, we'll feature dogs and other creatures in early August.

⇒You might recall last week's mention of new literary projects from Ben Greenman. Thanks to KQED, we've got a sneak preview of one of those projects: Correspondences, "a set of stories about correspondence, letter-writing, and how epistolary culture has changed over the years" that Akashic's Hotel St. George imprint will be published in a special 'book box" edition this fall, with each story printed on a separate removable insert. A 17-minute reading of one of those stories, "Helpmate," is available from the radio station's website in streaming or downloadable formats.

⇒Science fiction writer (and recurring GalleyCat presence) John Scalzi wound up on NPR's All Things Considered as part of a four-minute segment on what passes for dramatic in last week's Mars probe. You'll never look at a shovelful of dirt the same way again!

(photo of Greenman from the PAGE reading series)

So there was this rumor going around last week that somebody somewhere had a videotape of Michelle Obama, the wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, saying all sorts of terrible things about white people—but apparently whoever owns that tape is keeping it on a shelf right next to the one of Tommy Hilfiger on the Oprah Winfrey show... that is to say, it's a BS rumor from a BS source.

Or, rather, the source ultimately turns out not to be BS, just pure fiction. National Review blogger Jim Geraghty was one of the first to suggest that this rumor matches a key plot point in The Power Broker, a political thriller published two years ago. Except that in the novel, it's the candidate, an African-American U.S. Senator with close ties to a controversial minister, who's caught making the remarks. (Talking Points Memo confirms the details.) "Either author Stephen Frey is clairvoyant, writing this book in 2006," Geraghty observes. "Or this is one of the all time amazing coincidences. Or whoever started this rumor got the idea from a novel." I know which one I'm going with.

Here's an awkwardly punctuated sentence from a fall catalog that recently showed up in my mailbox, describing a novel coming out later this year, the name of which has been concealed to protect the innocent:

"By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, [REDACTED] reflects the literary depth and breadth of authors, such as Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe."

Yep: If you're going to go to all the trouble to write a book, you'll want it to reflect the literary depth and breadth of authors, sure enough. That extra comma is doubly unfortunate in that the writer in question is not primarily known as a "traditional novelist," but is in fact a darn good one; even the accidential implication that it's somehow surprising this person's work is as good as "authors" is undeserved.

Lauren Lipton, WSJ columnist and author of the novel It's About Your Husband, is about to teach her first mediabistro.com workshop —her three-hour seminar on how to get a literary agent will be held this Wednesday night (one of the last classes that'll be held in mediabistro.com's SoHo offices, by the way!), and she's looking forward to the gig, which she landed after recommendations from fellow novelists (and mediabistro.com instructors) Brenda Janowitz and Kristin Harmel.

"I think writers worry about finding an agent as much, if not more, than they fret about the quality of their work," Lipton emailed me over the weekend. "That's a shame. When I was looking for representation, I was surprised to find the process far less daunting than I'd imagined it to be. My goal for the seminar is to have people leave feeling calm and hopeful, armed with tools to make their search more efficient. As a special parting gift, they'll also get the name and phone number of a real, live literary agent who has agreed to let me pass out his contact information."

Lipton will also be teaching an eight-week advanced workshop on writing chick lit novels starting in mid-May, "though I'm going to call it Advanced Women's Fiction," she says. (Still, when somebody from the class sells their manuscript, betcha I know how the cover will turn out...and that's okay.)

Barrelhouse is looking for your best writing about the roller derby: "fiction, essays, poems, whatever you got." The finalists will see their work printed in the magazine's next issue, with the winner receiving an original work of art from Cory Oberndorfer, which will be just as roller-derby themed as the picture at left but inspired directly by whatever it is that person has written. "This essentially means that you will become immortalized in two formats: your roller derby writing will appear in the pages of Barrelhouse, and will also be celebrated in or serve as inspiration for Cory's work," the editors explain. "Which will also be the cover of the next issue of Barrelhouse. So essentially we're offering to make you a stone cold Mona Lisa style roller derby literary god or goddess whose roller derby writing will live on for all eternity."

Well, geez, who can turn down an offer like that? I might just have to bust out my old research notes on the '70s flick Kansas City Bomber...

Ever wonder what a book looks like before the pages are turned into a book? Harold Davis discusses the imposition proofs for his forthcoming Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers on his blog:

"Each of the large sheets of paper represents a signature of 16 or 24 pages that will be bound into the final, printed book," Davis explains. "This kind of proof is about how the pages will be ordered on press, and definitely not about color reproduction (there are other kinds of proofs that deal with color). When imposition proofs are done right (as these are), they show the printer has thought carefully about how the pages will be printed on press because images with strong color bias are located in 'columns' on the same press form (each form represented by an imposition proof sheet)."

You should really see the original-sized photo for the full effect, though. Oh, and there's another item in his blog that will definitely be of interest to visual artists, about how hosting his blogs images on Flickr led to nearly 1.5 million people viewing his work.

I was sifting through the latest Harvard Business Review over the weekend when I came across an interesting one-page interview with Prof. Sandra J. Sucher (left) about hacking her HBS class on "The Moral Leader" into an executive book club. To some of you, this may seem self-evident, as Sucher explains how discussing the moral dimensions of a literary work like The Remains of the Day provides an environment with sufficient distance from the workaday world to allow readers to explore the character's moral choices without self-imposed psychological restraints, and how a group conversation can lead to new insights. "Most of us believe that our moral views are self-evident," she says. "Hearing people present arguments you had never thought of is one way to strengthen your own moral reasoning skills." So, for the article, she draws upon her curriculum to create an executive reading list (PDF download) that ranges from Machiavelli and Sophocles to Allan Gurganus and Russell Banks. (See, too, a longer interview with Sucher that discusses her philosophical underpinnings in more detail.)

For me, the article sparked a series of marketing questions. I know book publishers have become proficient at marketing "book club books" to socially-motivated book clubs, and business books to business people. What I don't know is how good the industry is at marketing "book club books" to business people, or how one would go about doing that. But I'm thinking the increasing popularity of the "business fable" genre might demonstrate a hunger among executive (and aspiring executive) readers for powerful storytelling that publishers could tap into... and then you have to ask yourself, do you play it safe by sticking to the classics, or do you open things up and try to expose this class of readers to contemporary writers, some of whom might even be flying under the radar? And all this comes before the logistical questions of how you make the audience aware of the books... Do you have any ideas?

"I have been an editor for 13 years," says an anonymous gripester, "and... I have never in all my experience seen such a dumbing down of books."

"One look at the NYT bestseller list will convince anyone that I am right," the complaint continues. "The top two books are not really books, but book-like objects produced by TV personalities. The writing is so poor, but the attitude among publishers is who cares? Tom Brokov [sic] has book [sic] on The Sxties [sic], but would it have been a bestseller if he had not been on NBC for years? Coming in number 4 [sic] is a stupid little book by Anna Quindlen about how her lab taught her life lessons. You have got to be kidding me."

Well, either the person who wrote this letter doesn't work at Random House, or he or she does work there and has some serious Kate Medina issues... And is this person really trying to argue that there's no distinction to be made between Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Book and Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!)? Or that this list is so much worse than what people were buying 65 years ago?

Sure, there's books on the current bestseller list that don't impress me at all, and it could definitely use some more women writers besides Quindlen (and Allison Silverman on the I Am America committee), but there's also a commendable three-title run by Knopf of books by Oliver Sacks, Joseph Ellis, and Geoffrey C. Ward, along with other strong books by authors like Tony Dungy, Alan Weisman, A.J. Jacobs, and David Michaelis, covering a diverse range of subjects. (On a completely unrelated note, our national obsession with memoirs continues unabated; if you throw in the reflective elements of Brokaw's BOOM!, eight of the top ten nonfiction bestsellers fall into that category, and ten of the top fifteen.) And it's almost too obvious to point out that the bestsellers are only the barest fraction of what's available to readers.

But the whining didn't stop there. If only.

continued...

Congratulations to HarperCollins Children's Books senior publicist Melissa Dittmar (left), who was married last week to film marketing director Stephen Bruno. Their wedding was featured in the NYT Sunday style section, along with that of National Book Award-nominated* poet Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni.

*Additional research, prompted by a tip from a reader, indicates that Ms. Egan was only "nominated for a National Book Award," as the Times phrased it, in the sense that her publisher submitted the book for consideration.