Shelfari

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Stephen King on Raymond Carver by Carol Sklenicka and Carver's Collected Stories: King is pro-Maryann Carver (with a fellow AAer's disdain for Carver's drunken treatment of his first wife) and acidly anti-Gordon Lish: "Any writer might wonder what he'd do in such a case [as Lish's demand that Carver let him rewrite his work]. Certainly I did;
  in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in
  similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and
  two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but
  until reading Sklenicka's book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance
  Doubleday paid for 'Carrie.' Now I realize it may have been not winding
  up with Gordon Lish as my editor."
• Kakutani on Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout: "He draws on Armstrong's wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes
  in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with
  friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of
  Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes
  surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician who, like a Method
  actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a
  stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and
  the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful."
• Liesl Schillinger on There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: "Timeless and troubling, these 'scary fairy tales' grapple with
  accidents of fate and weaknesses of human nature that exact a heavy
  penance.... Short, highly concentrated, inventive and disturbing, her tales inhabit
  a border­line between this world and the next, a place where vengeance
  and grace may be achieved only in dreams.... Again and again, in surprisingly few words, her witchy magic foments an unsettling brew of conscience and consequences."
• Sean Wilentz on A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of a Continent by Robert W. Merry: "Sometimes reviving the old arguments of Polk's political foes,
  contemporary historians describe the war as a shameful act of
  imperialist plunder, ginned up by the president himself, with the
  not-so-hidden intention of spreading slavery into new lands.... Robert W. Merry's book is a refreshing challenge to the new conventional wisdom."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Family Album by Penelope Lively: "Penelope Lively's new novel comes wrapped as a celebration of
  old-fashioned domestic joy, with its heartwarming title, 'Family
  Album,' elegantly embroidered on the dust jacket. But be careful; she's
  left her needle in the cloth. It's a typical move for this old master,
  who frequently writes about sharp objects buried in our sepia-toned
  past. Although this little book can't compete with her Booker-winning 'Moon Tiger' or her fictionalized anti-memoir 'Consequences,' it's
  another winning demonstration of her wit; every wry laugh is the sound
  of a little hope being strangled."

Los Angeles Times:

• Ella Taylor on Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith: "Taken together, they reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous,
  erudite and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life,
  literature and a great deal in between.... Returning more than once -- as she does
  in her novels -- to a fractious but formative relationship with a much
  older father, whose ashes she once kept in a sandwich bag, Smith shows
  herself in more ways than one to be a very old, empathetic head on
  ridiculously young shoulders.... It's in her impassioned, compulsively dialectical and endearingly wonkish inquiry into literature that Smith really takes off."
• Regina Marler on As God Commands by Niccolo Ammaniti: "Although the shocks escalate, gore-spattered readers who persevere into
  the next few chapters will probably be won over by Ammaniti's immense
  gifts for pacing, psychological clarity and singular detail. His
  steely, quick-moving prose (translated from the Italian by Jonathan
  Hunt) suits his unsavory material -- he's in and out like a knife
  thrust."

The Globe & Mail:

• Guy Gavriel Kay onThe Humbling by Philip Roth: "There is matter to admire in The Humbling, and more than a
  little to think about, but there is also a sense that this material has
  been covered before by Roth with greater force and subtlety. The book
  is of interest to those tracking the palette and preoccupations of the
  man who may be the United States' finest living writer. It is not,
  however, a good starting place for encountering his art, nor for
  deepening a response to it."
• Roger Morris on The Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch: "Yet the seductions of proximity are lethal. Branch is far more
  sympathizer and intellectual co-dependent than an even mildly neutral
  oral historian. The empathetic but critical, thoroughly informed
  perspectives he brought to his multivolume portrait of Rev. King sadly
  desert him "“ or are jettisoned "“ in one of the most extraordinary
  opportunities ever given a historian. The result does little service to
  either the author or his subject."
• Donna Scanlon on Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins: "The middle book of a trilogy is always dicey territory. Since it is a
  bridge between the first book and the third book, the potential for
  suspense can be limited. In most trilogies, the reader expects the
  protagonist to survive at least until the third book, and that
  expectation can put pressure on the author and a strain on the plot. Happily, this is not the case for Suzanne Collins. Catching Fire is every bit as suspenseful as The Hunger Games. The numerous plot twists leave the reader breathless and giddy, and the characterizations are razor sharp."

The Guardian:

• James Lasdun on Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marias: "A little patience, in other words, is required of the reader, but it is
  amply rewarded. By the second volume all cylinders in its large and
  powerful engines are purring smoothly. And with this triumphant finale
  "“ the longest and best of all three "“ it becomes impossible to resist
  the thought that this deeply strange creation, with its utterly sui
  generis methods, its brilliant disquisitions on love and loss, its dark
  playfulness, may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece
  of the 21st century."
• Geraldine Bedell on A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow: "Contemporary readers are quite comfortable with the idea that there
  is no essentialist, non-performative self, that individuals are made up
  of the roles they play. And in this case the roles are endlessly
  fascinating because, to survive, Charles could never stop being the
  king. There was no such thing as private space. This masterly, wide-ranging biography resists the temptation to take sides on Charles (who has variously been
  depicted in the past as the 'merrie monarch' and a libertine let-down),
  though it is impossible not to find him appealing."
• Michel Faber on The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb: "If the book does not intend to ridicule, what exactly is its intent?
  Hard to imagine. Crumb's lack of religious fervour means the images
  lack the weird mystery that suffuses the visions of, say, William Blake
  or David Tibet. But, with his gifts for satire and grotesque
  playfulness locked away, Crumb merely manages to depict the soap-opera
  antics of primitive Israelites in a manner that neither illuminates nor
  nuances them."
• Andrew Motion on Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: "Van Gogh's
  letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving,
  energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while
  illuminating the creative process in general.... There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about
  insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the
  great majority of them are impressive "“ even lovable "“ because, no
  matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an
  extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in
  their account of complicated emotional states.... The new book (or rather the new books "“ there are five large volumes of
  correspondence and a sixth of associated material) is one of the major
  publishing achievements of our time."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood lowers the boom on Paul Auster, including the new Invisible: "Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately
  bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the
  cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then
  slain..... Paul
  Auster is probably America's best-known postmodern novelist; his 'New
  York Trilogy' must have been read by thousands who do not usually read
  avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with
  mediation and borrowedness"”hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus
  dialogue"”and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it."

New York Review of Books:

• Paula Fox on A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis: "L.J. Davis isn't a satirist. There are no Houyhnhnms in A Meaningful Life.
  Swift is savage, but the Houyhnhnms offer a standard that one may also
  call an ideal. Satire has to have such an ideal, without which it is
  something else. Davis's novel is something else. It is a comic novel of
  existential loathing, written with a fine spontaneity that reflection
  and rewriting might have tempered"”tempered the existential suggestion
  right out of it."
• Claire Messud on My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran by Haleh Esfandiari: "Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. My Prison, My Home is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis,
  from the initial staged 'robbery' when she was on her way to Tehran
  airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a
  passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and
  eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also
  provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth
  century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an
  outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She
  is restrained in her telling"”the book is filled with vivid details and
  facts, rather than emotional outpouring"”a decision for which her
  narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who
  fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to
  elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her
  native culture."

--Tom

Behind the Cover: Questions for Designer Peter Mendelsund

By Tom

As we collected the names of cover designers for the 60 books we had chosen for our Best Book Covers of 2009 vote, a few names came up more than once (Rodrigo Corral, Scott Magoon, Jaya Miceli, the photographer Phillipe Halsman, who took both the Liz Taylor and Louis Armstrong portraits used on the covers of their biographies, and of course Dave Eggers, who is credited with designing one of the nominated books he wrote and most likely had some say in the other two on the list he wrote or edited). But one name, a designer at Knopf, came up three times. No, not the one celebrity in the book design business, the fabled Chip Kidd. It was Peter Mendelsund, whose name you also start to see quite a bit if you start to follow book design discussions.

The three 2009 covers of his that made our ballot were each distinctive and true to their subjects, with no apparent connection between them: Lark and Termite, Robert Altman, and The Girl Who Played with Fire. (We could just as easily have chosen a number of his other '09 works, such as Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes, Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, or Peter Maass's Crude World.) Among his earlier work, he's also known for the geometric shapes of his series of Dostoyevsky reprints (e.g. The Idiot and The Double and The Gambler), the terrifying wonder box of Martin Amis's House of Meetings, and the deliriouslylayeredcovers of Ozamu Tezuka's manga series Dororo, for Vertical, the manga publisher where he is art director (along with being a senior designer at Knopf).

We wanted to get a glimpse inside the process of designing a book cover, and we had also heard that Mendelsund had not taken a traditional path to that craft, so we were happy for the chance to ask him a few questions below. (You can also find an excellent interview of Mendelsund by fellow designer Christopher Tobias--who himself designed The Age of Wonder this year, among others--and a gallery of Mendelsund's covers at the Book Cover Archive, as well as a gallery of his spines on his own, under-construction site.) --Tom

Amazon.com: Forgive me for asking, since you've told this story in every interview or profile I've read of you, but could you say a little about your unlikely path to the profession of book design? You were trained and worked as a musician, a concert pianist, but within a year of taking up graphic design you were a staff designer at perhaps the most prestigious house in publishing, Knopf.

Mendelsund: It honestly never occurred to me that the transition from musician to jacket designer was all that strange, though the more I more I'm asked this specific question in interviews, and the more I'm told how unorthodox my path was by my fellow designers, the more I'm inclined to believe that maybe there is something notably odd about my particular story.

Here's how it happened (and if you've heard this all before, feel free to skip ahead!): about seven years ago, I had just finished my graduate work at conservatory. I was getting competition programs together, and playing concerts in New York. But practicing in the house was proving difficult with a young child around (my first daughter, Ruby), and, frankly, my wife and I needed more money as well as health insurance. It seemed clear that I needed a "real" job. So I thought about things I enjoyed doing other than playing music (reading, art), and design emerged at some point as a possibility. I bought some books on graphic design, taught myself the requisite software, and then offered my services to a record label where I had previously recorded as a pianist. The label generously let me do some cd design work (though I think they were pretty baffled by the entire endeavor) and, after about six months or so, I had a portfolio of completed work. Almost immediately after that, I got a call from a friend of the family, who was friends with Chip (Kidd) at Random House; I was given an interview with John Gall, showed him my portfolio, and a week after that I was designing book covers at Vintage. Eight months after that, I was at Knopf.

Though the transition took place over the span of only a year or so, I remember (naively) not feeling overly daunted by any of it. Back then, as I was preparing to leave music after more than twenty-five years of study, every other field just seemed both less compelling, and undemanding by comparison. There was music, and then there was everything else. I remember thinking that I might as well have been washing dishes, or selling vacuum cleaners. In some ways, my next career could have been just about anything. I suppose what I'm driving at is that no matter what I ended up doing, that job would have felt 1) like a non sequitur, and 2) easier then playing solo recitals.

As time passes, and I've come to appreciate design as an art in its own right, and I've bumped up against some of its particular complexities, I've come to realize how incredibly fortunate I am to be doing what I do, and working where I do. Knopf is where designers (and editors, readers) go, if they've been good, when they die.

(But when things get tough at the office, I like to remind myself that things could be worse: I could be playing for a competition jury. This is a mantra I find calming.)

Amazon.com: It's my impression that your background as a reader was at least as appealing to those who hired you as your design skills. Is that so? Is that typical, or rare, among book designers?

Mendelsund: Well, I remember in my interview with John (Gall) and Carol (Carson), I spent a lot of the time talking with them about the books on their shelves. I was so stunned to see all these titles I had just read, or was intending to read, just sitting around in cubicles and hallways and on floors, spilling out of half-opened boxes, in unheard-of abundance. I think it all made me kind of giddy. My guess is that my enthusiasm was apparent to the people here, and probably worked in my favor.

And I am not alone in this--all the Knopf Group designers are passionate book-lovers and serious readers. Almost all of us have liberal arts backgrounds of one type or another (I myself was a philosophy major at Columbia as an undergraduate). I truly believe that our group's ability to read deeply greatly improves our ability to design well, and, equally if not more importantly, increases the odds that our designs get approved at the end of the day. I can't really speak to whether other book design departments are similar or not--but I would hope that the reason one designs books (rather than any other product) is that one feels a special affinity towards them.

Amazon.com: What was your reading life like before you went pro in the book business? Are there covers you remember well (or still hold onto), that helped define the experience of a book for you? Were there books you bought just for their covers?

Mendelsund: I am, and always have been, a voracious reader, but, strangely, I hardly noticed covers at all before I was a cover designer. Until I was hired here, I was completely unaware that such a thing as a cover design, or designer, existed. It never occurred to me that somebody had actually thought about, and constructed these things. I just kind of looked through the jacket to the book beneath (and from time to time, still do).

The memorable exception would be my first encounter with the Zone books in the late eighties. I remember walking into the old Columbia University Bookforum and seeing those jackets, and some deep, limbic, animal part of me just going berserk. I bought the Zone Henri Bergson on the spot. And I still haven't read it.

Amazon.com: I don't think anyone would immediately spot a trademark connecting the three covers of yours--Lark and Termite, Robert Altman, and The Girl Who Played with Fire--that are among our Best Covers of 2009 nominees (although it is true that none of them features the back of a woman's head). Are there elements or approaches that you think define your style? Could you give us the story behind how each of those three covers came about?

Mendelsund: I think, rather than a set style, I have certain favored modes I like to employ. For instance, the first thing I noticed when I started working as a book designer was that the majority of new book jackets employed photographs. I am drawn to abstract illustrated jackets (as most dust jackets were, up until the eighties) because, generally speaking, these covers leave more to the reader's imagination than one using a photograph will (and, incidentally, the authors who I've informally polled on this issue agree with me). As a result I've tended to work with illustration more than photography, though I would say that I am trending back the other direction now that jackets are beginning to be predominantly illustrative again. (Contrarian streak? Yes.) So two of the three covers you mentioned use illustrations. The third, the Altman, just had to be a photo (and this one in particular: it is just so iconic, and Altman looks so wonderfully formidable in it.)

What all three jackets truly have in common is that they were all extremely difficult to arrive at. (Sometimes the cover concept comes to me immediately, and sometimes, sadly, not so immediately...) For instance, the first Larsson in the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as it appears now, is perhaps the fiftieth version of this cover I made. Actually, both Larssons, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as well as The Girl Who Played with Fire, were tricky in their own ways...

With the first volume (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) I found myself up against two major psychological impediments:

1. The dragon tattoo itself plays no discernable role whatsoever in the plot of the first book (and so I was dead set on not showing a dragon tattoo on the front), and
2. The book takes place on a far-flung Swedish island, a milieu which is so crucial to the story that it is almost a character in its own right. As Swedish islands tend to be, this one is snow-swept, desolate, almost totally devoid of color; so naturally I pitched white covers. White-on-white even. Imagine how excited the sales and marketing folks were when I showed them that first, blind-debossed, white jacket... Not very. And who can blame them? What I didn't quite get, was that the best solution to this particular design problem was the obvious one. A dragon tattoo. Who woulda thunk it. In any case, the fun part here was the formal challenge of having the type interact with the image in an interesting and novel way.

With the second Larsson in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, I got off to a good start, but hit some snags along the way. The concept of using the main character, Lisbeth Salander's hair (a blond wig she wears as a disguise) as a metaphor for the fire of the title came to me right away. My younger daughter Violet was visiting the office, and her hair was just insane looking that day. So I snapped a photo and put in the type, all the while thinking that this comp would be merely the basis for an illustration. We hired someone to draw the hair, and it looked gorgeous. But in the interim, everyone here had fallen in love with the original photo. So we went back to it. Except the original background was black and I was told the cover needed more color. (Truth be told, I really prefer the original dark version). It took a long while and a ton of effort to get this cover to be the red it is today. But people seem to like it, so who am I to argue? For me, the real reward is that people are constantly telling me "I really love the cover you did for 'The Girl Whose Hair Was On Fire.'" They seem to think this is the actual title.

Amazon.com: There must be many cooks putting their spoons in the broth when a book cover is being designed. I imagine it's the one thing that everybody feels they have an opinion about, especially now, when yet another opinion is just a forwarded .jpg away. How do you navigate through all those visions to keep your own? What's the ideal role for an author to play in the process (aside from being dead)?

Mendelsund: I understand how hard it must be for an author to yield control of their book- They've spent an intense period of time alone with their work, having exercised absolute ownership over every little aspect of its content, only to have to cede authority to someone in a design department (of all places) in order to present it to the world. It must feel like a violation of some kind. Like having a stranger dress you before you leave your house. I would imagine that they just cross their fingers and pray that we have good taste and have done our homework. It must be a real trial.

On the other hand, I've found, more often than not, that the author is not the best judge of what their book should look like. They are often too close to their text to see the larger picture. (Not to mention that descriptive, or narrative talent is no guarantee of visual acuity or good taste.)

In any case, when the issue of what a cover should look like is thrown out to a wider public (agents, friends and relatives of authors, book buyers for chain stores, etc.) and any old person can comment freely, the result is similar to our national health care debate--the crazies come out to play and the discussion quickly becomes farcical. That's when you start to hear things like "I hate the color blue," and "Here's a drawing my niece made, can you work it in?" and my favorite: "There's not enough blood."

But we are lucky here at Knopf, in that our editors (and especially our brilliant editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta) do a great job filtering out just this type of noise. In any case, if an author is unhappy with what we've done, we either change it, or try to convince them of its merits. At the end of the day, we're not going to put a jacket that an author doesn't like on their book. But we're not going to design by committee either.

Amazon.com: Do you or other designers take into account these days how your cover will appear online (often in a very tiny size)? Is that too depressing to even consider? (One element I know you pay attention to that is usually invisible on Amazon is the spine: the Altman book, for instance, has that great list of contributors running down the spine.) Do some of your covers work particularly well online?

Mendelsund: To be honest, I've never paid real attention to what my jackets look like on Amazon--I assume, wrongly or rightly, that the cover has to do less heavy lifting online than it does in a bookstore. You would know more about this matter than I would, but I would assume that covers matter less in terms of driving sales in online transactions than they do at brick-and-mortar stores.

Also, no matter what decisions you make as a jacket designer, there are going to be certain aspects of a design that simply won't translate online. For instance, the salient design feature of Jayne Anne Phillips's jacket (Lark & Termite) is the paper it is printed on--a brown craft paper. The utilitarian simplicity of the stock implies something particular about the substance and general affect of the narrative. This just cannot be conveyed by a thumbnail image (when I post a book image on my blog, or on my portfolio site, I try to make sure that the image at least a couple of inches high--anything smaller and, to me anyway, it's fairly useless).

But as I said above, I suspect that your prospective buyers aren't taking their cues from the jpg, but rather from the customer reviews, sales rankings, synopses etc. My role in this case is greatly diminished. When you asked earlier if I have ever purchased a book because of the cover alone, I can say with certainty that I've never bought a book online due to the cover alone. I, and I think others as well, just shop differently online. Though maybe I'm wrong.

In any case, when the thumbnail becomes important in jacket design, then book jackets have gone the way of LP sleeves.

Amazon.com: As the age of electronic books seems to have arrived, does that make you more or less conscious of the book as a physical object in itself?

Mendelsund: For the record, I am a tech junkie, and not some kind of luddite or book fetishist--but I firmly believe that a book is more than a mere repository of information (though it performs well as one). A book is also a trophy, a mnemonic device, a totem, an indicator of taste, an emblem of status, a decorating tool, an inscribe-able, meaningful gift, a cultural touchstone. It is durable, mutable, and highly personalize-able. It is an essentially democratic object--just as anyone can (and God help us, will) write a book, pretty much anyone can make a book as well. (Good luck distilling your own E Ink). We all have a general understanding of how books are produced, and conversely we are all estranged from the workings of e-readers. Why does this matter? I'm not sure--but in a very similar fashion, I feel more simpatico with my records than I do with my mp3 files, because I kinda get how the sound is produced by placing a needle on a groove. And this feeling, in some ineffable way, changes the experience of listening for me. Digitized media is fundamentally alienating on some level, though this is, obviously the way most media will be, inevitably, in the post-analog age.

That being said, I would very much like to own a Kindle and put it through its paces--and I will certainly be first in line when the Apple tablet comes out (if it ever does). And Knopf, if you are listening, it would be great not to lug stacks of manuscripts with me whenever I go on one of my (rare) vacations. In other words: there is a place for the e-reader, and that place is in my carry-on bag.

Reporting from the Road: NYC/Boston

By Jeff VanderMeer

I'm now in week three of a five-week book tour...

The New York/Boston gigs for my novel Finch and for Booklife were a lovely blur. I enjoy both cities, and we had a great attendance at both boookstore events, with raucous, fully engaged crowds. I read with Paul Tremblay and David Anthony Durham in Boston and with Geoff Manaugh and Jeffrey Ford in NYC (with Ron Hogan moderating a discussion of cities real and unreal). I also did an MIT lecture with great attendance at MIT's new media studies center. The lecture focused on aspects of private and public booklife and should be available via podcast soon. Afterwards, we had a Q&A session hosted by Kevin Smokler of booktour.com.

As ever, New York was dirty, gritty, and fantastically alive. I walked everywhere I could, ignoring the subway, just to reacquaint myself with the texture of the city. Whether walking through a high-end shopping district or being interviewed in a dive bar around 44th Street and 9th Ave, attending the National Book Awards with my wife or eating breakfast in a greasy diner, I was once again in love with the energy you could find on every street corner. After the bookstore event, we invited everyone to join us at a local bar, and a good thirty people did, including Ford and Manaugh and Hogan, but also people like Rick Bowes, Paul Witcover, and Lev Grossman. I really enjoyed meeting Lev for the first time, and loved that he seemed comfortable discussing both high and low culture. The whole evening was a lot of fun for me--so great to see so many old friends, too.

   
 
(From the Plymouth State exhibit, along with the poster for the Baltimore event...)

Boston I also had a chance to explore--I stayed at a great boutique hotel called the Chartermark, and highly recommend it to anyone who visits Boston. It's right on Copley Square in the center of everything, and I booked it the day before I arrived, which seemed to help ensure a reasonable rate. From there, I walked across the city, just taking in the sights. There's something about being alone in a big city at the beginning of winter that's invigorating. I got lost a couple of times, wandered into a somewhat anemic Chinatown, then found my bearings again just in time for, as I rummaged for my cell phone, some guy to walk past and drop a quarter in my outstretched coffee cup...which wasn't entirely empty. It made me realize my jacket might've gotten more rumpled than I'd thought. But, the quarter helped make up a little bit for an experience on the Amtrak train coming down. I put in a generous tip at the food car before ordering, then was told the credit card machine didn't work--but my last cash was in the tip jar, and the attendant wouldn't let me take it back out. Thus, I had a somewhat uncomfortable non-food, non-coffee four-hour ride to Boston.

The city itself made up for that, and the accompanying exhaustion, as did the company at both MIT and the bookstore event. One of my biggest supporters, Rob Davies, had distributed posters, and I was glad to finally meet him. It was also great to get to know David Anthony Durham and Paul Tremblay a little better. My only regret is not hitting the gym while in Boston. I'm going to have to make up for that while here in New Hampshire. I'm staying with the excellent nonfiction/fiction writer Matthew Cheney at the moment, in preparation for speaking at Plymouth State University tonight. It's a fairly unique event, as I'll be teaming up with long-time collaborator Eric Schaller. Eric did many of the illustrations in City of Saints & Madmen, among others, and Plymouth State has been running an exhibit related to this collaboration for the past month. I'll speak a little bit about City of Saints and the effects of having something so idiosyncratic out in the world, and then Eric will present a selection of his art and talk about the collaborative process--followed by discussion and Q&A.

After that, it's four days off before hitting Baltimore's Book Escape on Nov. 29th at 3:30 pm with mystery novelist Sarah Ruttan and mystery columnist Brian Lindemuth for readings and discussion of noir. I also just got the great news that my wife and I will indeed by featured on national NPR's Weekend Edition sometime in the near future, so check out the next couple of Sundays for that...

Prior posts:

- National Book Award follow-up (with more to come)

- National Book Award coverage

- Tour Update from LA and San Francisco

- Tour Update from Seattle, Portland, San Bernardino

End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

By Paul

Quick links from around the kid-lit blogosphere:

Turn your iPhone into a wand! There's a new Harry Potter app out now called "Spells," which lets you join a Hogwarts school, learn spells (from Stupefy to Expelliarmus), and duel with other "students" (via wifi or Bluetooth).

Wimpy Kid zombie parody. Publishers Weekly is calling this graphic-novel parody of the Wimpy Kid books "lightning in a bottle." Tales from the Crypt #8: Diary of a Stinky Dead Kid has apparently gone back for its second and third printing.

"Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical." School Library Journal talks to Mo Willems about his Knuffle Bunny series, and especially the upcoming musical appearing in the Kennedy Center's 2010 season. ("The Kennedy Center was foolish enough to let me write the script and song lyrics, although they did give me a fantastic dramaturg named Megan Alrutz to help me focus on the emotional through line of the story instead of spending all my time figuring out the giant puppet man-eating brassiere.")

2009 Winter Blog Blast Tour. Chasing Ray sponsored and scheduled last week's 2009 Winter Blog Blast Tour, a ton of author interviews across a smattering of great blogs. If you missed it, go back and check it out.

PBS Booklights' Thursday Three: Thanksgiving. Hopefully Pam gets to take *next* Thursday off, but last week she was kind enough to serve up some seasonal selections, with three picks for Turkey Day: Thanksgiving in the White House by Gary Hines, This Is the Turkey by Abby Levine, and 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by good ol' Dav Pilkey ("The book is blunt at times about the fate of these birds, but always funny, especially when the kids leave the farm considerably fatter and with feathers sticking out from their coats.").

A middle-grade H1N1 novel. Wha? It's true: Publishers Weekly has the story on Finn Reeder, Flu Fighter, a new novel about a 13-year-old coping with the pandemic. ("Somehow, he survives infection. As their class size dwindles, Finn and his friend Amy face down the school bully, draw comics, catch the principal ordering pizza, and even manage to study once in a while. And when finally, Finn is the lone student remaining in school, he manages to win"”and lose"”the most intense game of solo dodge ball ever.") You can download it for free before the January 1 release date.

"Hollywood Takes a Closer Look at Picture Books." In which we learn, among other things, that there's going to be a Where's Waldo? movie(!).

Jason Schwartzman interview. Speaking of Hollywood, Jason Schwartzman (currently Ash in the Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the book by Roald Dahl) was just interviewed by ReadKiddoRead, about his favorite books as a kid:



(via Fuse #8) --Paul

Go Ahead, Judge: The Best Book Covers of 2009

By Tom

As anyone in the business of selling books knows, sometimes we really do judge books by their covers. (I know I've bought books because of their covers, and not bought others for the same reason.) We've blogged casually but enthusiastically about our favoritebook covers in previous years (and it's a constant topic of conversation on our book team here and just about anywhere book people get together, as far as I can tell), but this year, as they say in the reality shows, we've taken it to the next level. Thanks to our Magazines team, which built a sleek and fun voting widget to help them choose the best magazine covers of the year (here's their landing page--the widget itself lives no more now that the voting is over), we were able to do the same to open up customer voting for the best book covers of 2009. And so we narrowed down our favorite covers of the year to 60 nominees in ten categories, and now the rest is up to you.

You can find a link to the best covers voting on our Best Books of 2009 page, but if you're in a hurry, you can go straight to the voting page. The first round of voting, in which you choose your favorite in each of the ten categories, goes through December 7, and then they'll be a second round through December 17 to choose the Best Cover of 2009 from the 10 category champs.

We'll be posting plenty more about covers here over the next few weeks (including interviews with designers and more), but let's just start off with our nominees. You can see larger versions of all these images on our voting page or on this page, but here's a quick thumbnail gallery of each category after the jump. I know which ones I love the best (hereareafew), but I'm looking forward to seeing what the top choices will turn out to be from this lovely array. And if there are favorites of yours that have been left off the ballot (some of my personal favorites didn't make the cut either), please shout them out in the comments, and we can feature some of them on Omni later. (We're not the only ones doing this, by the way: I know that the excellent Book Design Review is going to hold their annual favorite covers poll, with a little twist this year, by asking three booksellers to make their own selections.)

This one of the most fun things we've put together on the site recently, and we hope you'll enjoy it too.

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

Childrens & Teens:

Arts & Comics:

Cooking, Food & Wine:

Famous Faces:

One of a Kind Covers:

Classics Reimagined:

Paperbacks:

From a Series:

--Tom

Omni Daily News

By Lauren Nemroff

Oprah's Movin' On:  Today Oprah Winfrey announced that the "The Oprah Winfrey Show"--the biggest daytime show in television history-- will come to a close during its 25th season. The last show will air on September 9, 2011. The multimedia icon and mogul is expected to launch a new talk show on her eponymous cable network.  [Yahoo News via AP and The New York Times]

Martin Amis' New Novel: In an interview in today's Guardian, Martin Amis talks about the genesis of his forthcoming novel The Pregnant Widow (coming May 2010), and counters claims that the story--which follows the lives a group of young people during the sexual revolution of the 1970's and the negative consequences of promiscuity for women--might be interpreted as anti-feminist. Amis "insisted that it was actually 'a very feminist book'." [The Guardian]

Open and Shut Case:   David Davis of the LA Times reviews Andre Agassi's just released autobiography, Open, and finds it an "inspiring acheivement."  Don't miss Agassi's candid and touching video introduction to the book. [LA Times]

Moving & shaking:  Sportscaster Len Berman's The Greatest Moments in Sports lands in our top 10 Movers & Shakers following his discussion of history-making games on this morning's Today Show. 

--Lauren

Graphic Novel Friday: "The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book"

By Alex Carr

Rolling in like a slow, fuzzed-out guitar line from an Orange-brand amp,The Red Monkey Double Happiness Booklives up to the good vibes promised in its title.

Artist and writer Joe Daly's full-color graphic novel collects two stories starring best buds Dave and Paul, as they wander about Cape Town while fully under the influence. Dave has a genetic disorder he calls "monkey feet," where his feet have what appear to be opposable digits. Throughout the book, Dave tries to overcome insecurities stemming from this oddity, and Paul tries his best to compliment his friend's feet ("You're a lucky dude, Dave"¦I guess."). In the first story, Paul drops in on Dave, sheepishly asking to borrow money, but Dave's internal monologue betrays a bit of resentment from past experience. No clichéd flashbacks or expository dialogue break the moment, though, and it passes sharply. The duo share a friendship so realized that I wondered if I hadn't somehow missed an earlier volume or two. 

This may sound like a strange compliment, but the color separation in The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a highlight. It's clean, crisp, and exact. In one panel, Dave is in an apartment surrounded by frogs, each with individually-colored patterns and pigmentation. One leaps from a pool of water, giving off a splash that sends droplets of blue about the room and onto Dave. Daly is careful to separate this blue from the tint in the sky that lies behind Dave through an open window. The attention to detail only deepens as Dave and Paul cruise the city in Dave's "cool old car," past a shipyard, into a rainforest, and more. Cape Town feels and looks like Cape Town, so much that it is easy to take for granted as the story opens wide.

Having recently finished Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, I couldn't help but consider The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book as a distant third-cousin to those titles. Daly's work includes the psychedelic mystery elements from Inherent Vice (the aforementioned apartment full of hallucinogenic amphibians and a quest to locate a capybara named "John Wesley Harding"--yes, named after the Bob Dylan album), and all the spacey dialogue from Chronic City ("That was a really great moment when Kermit the Frog and Ray Charles sang together on The Muppet Show, hey, dude?").

The bad news is that I could not find more Dave and Paul stories, but the good news is that I wanted to. In my search, I found that Joe Daly has an earlier book, Scrublands, and a new title arriving later in 2010 called Dungeon Quest: Book One (all of his books are from Fantagraphics). While waiting for the latter, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a weekend read, best consumed with your feet propped up, opposable digits or not.

National Book Awards: A Newcomer's Point of View

By Jeff VanderMeer

 
(The crowd lining up to get into the National Book Awards, the amazing Cipriani ceiling inside)

The National Book Awards for first-time attendees like my wife Ann and me constituted a kind of blur of sharp-dressed men and women, most of them graying a bit but still elegant, mixed with a few twenty-somethings running around on the fringes like the kids at a bar mitzvah. The location, with its high ceilings and spectacular dome, perfectly lit, conveyed a sense more of publishing's memory palace than of its harsh reality right now. At the same time, you could hardly blame editors and writers, publishers and agents, for wanting to engage in a high-end collective sigh of relief that, despite many grim indicators, the whole thing hasn't yet gone bust.

Gore Vidal in his wheelchair proved a compelling figure"”obviously frail but clear-headed, able to spin a story, and quite interesting. Sean Hannity and Harvey Weinstein (or a good look-alike) chatting provided a moment of severe dislocation. Dave Eggers at times seeming to want to fade into the wall was interesting. For an outsider who didn't know many of the faces, I felt a certain frustration that there weren't better ways to identify the nominees"”Young Person's Book nominee Laini Taylor's pink hair made her easy to locate, but otherwise I had to rely on the overhead monitors, which periodically showed book covers and the corresponding author.

Although I overheard several cynical responses on press row to, for example, Gore Vidal's speech, I never thought any part of the evening lacked sincerity, and there were several moments of genuine emotion. The interplay between Vidal and Joanne Woodward, for example, was a rare example of a private moment in a public space. Eggers talking about his pirate shop in San Francisco, which serves as a kind of front for education and for reading, evoked for me a real sense of not only books still being viable and important but also reaffirmed the idea that each of us can make a difference. Having a chance to meet the genuinely sweet Junot Diaz was a treat for both me and Ann. Some people have a kind of presence about them that makes you glad to know them, and Junot is one of those people.

  

The speeches from the winners were, frankly, not particularly memorable, but, then, writers are not, all appearances to the contrary, performers. Meanwhile, there was the absurdism of press row"”a series of tableclothed bleacher seating with waiters providing wine, and then, behind a curtain, food in the form of crustless sandwiches. It was a somewhat odd sight"”the idea of the press corps as the audience for a banquet, everyone twittering or working on rough drafts of their stories. Something illegitimate about the space, publicists and editors bringing up their authors to select reporters to make a bit of a pitch, a bit of a meet-and-greet"”all of it flanked by the establishment's security guards (including one man who leaned down in impeccable James Bond suit to where I was desperately recharging my phone to ask "Can I help you, sir?", by which he clearly meant, "Get the heck out of here.").

But we behaved ourselves, and Ann got a real kick out of the whole shindig. Next morning, of course, many of those in attendance went back to cramped offices and marketing meetings about how to best take advantage of the upcoming holiday season.

I had actually spent the day meeting with editors as preamble to the awards ceremony"”a nice lunch with my editor David Cashion at Abrams about the Steampunk Bible I'm working on, a late afternoon meet-and-greet with Diana Gill at HarperCollins, who just bought our anthology Thackery T. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities. Editors are still buying books, and unlike the banking industry and loans to small business, they seem to be buying more of them again. Does it mean anything? It might not,  but the entire day seemed to serve as a reminder that publishing is indeed not dead.

More on the National Book Awards over the weekend--and don't forget to check out the archive of the live coverage here and Tom Nissley's great round-up post here.

Omni Daily Crush: "Changing My Mind"

By Tom

Zadie Smith is not only one of my favorite novelists to read, but one of favorite novelists to hear talk about being a novelist (she's like Jonathan Lethem that way). As I wrote in my Best of November review of her new collection of "occasional essays," Changing My Mind, it's been clear that she is a novelist from the moment she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind of novelist she is (or will become) seems open to change. I was always fascinated with her response to James Wood's sometimes harsh criticisms of her early work: without being either defensive or defenseless, she seemed to take his critique back home for consideration, and to look at her own work as something outside herself, something that doesn't define her and that she expects to move beyond.

She seems wonderfully open to absorbing influence, while retaining her core intelligence, warmth, and wit--that's clear from her novels, but also from her critical essays, which are not distant pronouncements or summaries, but almost physical engagements with her reading (or watching, as in the case of her movie reviews or her excellent pieces on Katherine Hepburn and the love of a particular kind of British comedy she shared with her father). When she writes a piece comparing two recent novels (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder), it's as if she's trying both their styles of fiction on for herself (and one imagines part of her rougher treatment of Netherland is that it's closer to the kind of writing she's done in the past and wants to outgrow).

Her only essay in the collection that's directly about her own writing, "That Crafty Feeling," is one of my favorites, especially for the way she talks about her openness to influence. She acknowledges that some writers can't read other writers at all while they are working on their own books, but (also like Lethem) she's the opposite: "My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight." And the influences extend from book to book:

Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you were going.

There's an ease to all of this river-crossing, it seems, just as there appears to be in her unfailing graceful sentences. But one of her further charms is that she's always looking to turn a story like that against itself, and so in her brilliant piece on Barack Obama and Pygmalion, she acknowledges the costs of such transformations through the words of others. She discusses her own hard-earned speaking voice, "the rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place," which was not the voice she grew up with. Thinking that she was adding a voice through her education, she has since found that she lost the other:

Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose--now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth.

Regrets or not, you get the feeling that her voice, along with her mind, will continue to change, in her novels as well as in these lovely, brilliant essays that are their equal. --Tom

Omni Daily News

By Dave Callanan

Dream Big:  Four years ago, author Stephenie Meyer had a life-changing dream about a vampire in a meadow. 70 million copies later, it appears she was correct to act on it.

Basketball Jones:  Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum and I are on the same page:  this is a great year for hoops books.

Style Candy:  New York Times bestselling author Lauren Conrad will be sharing her fashion sense next fall with her first nonfiction book, Lauren Conrad Style. 

The book, which will be published by Harper Collins next fall, will also include exclusives shots of the ex-"Hills" star and her own personal advice on how to infuse her fashionable traits into every day life.

Moving, Shaking, and Cooking:  After his Top Chef performance last night, Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook occupies the top spot on our Movers & Shakers list today.