Gere-ing Up for Role as Emperor?: The Wrap reports that director Noah Bambach ("The Squid and the Whale") has been tapped to turn Claire Messud's bestselling novel, The Emperor's Children (an Amazon Best of the Year Pick in 2006) into a film. Actor Richard Gere, Keira Knightley, Eric Bana will likely take leading roles. Although unconfirmed, it seems likely that the silver-maned Gere will play the role of the Upper West Side literati "emperor" Murray Thwaite--a limousine liberal journalist who is struggling to find his next great literary success. (The Wrap via Shelf Awareness)
Hans Christian Anderson Medalist 2010: The biennial prize that has sometimes been referred to as Sweden's "Little Nobel" for the category of children's literature has just been awarded to British author David Almond and German illustrator Jutta Bauer. The HCAA is considered the most prestigious international award for this category. The announcement was made at this year's Bologna Children's Book Fair. [PW]
Big Bank for The Wind in the Willows:The Guardian reports that a first edition of The Wind in the Willows, signed by the author Kenneth Grahame to the daughter of a friend who inspired the character of Ratty, has sold at auction for a whopping 32,000 pounds (about $48,000)--apparently ten times what it was expected to fetch. More affordable is children's lit expert Seth Leher's fascinating annotated edition of the classic (published last year by Harvard's Belnap Press). A personal favorite, it's the ultimate guide to Grahame's masterpiece and features E.H. Shepherd's original illustrations.
Moving and Shaking: Brooklyn artist and blogger Bill Zeman's Tiny Art Director bounces into the top spot on today's Movers & Shakers list thanks to some additional exposure from BoingBoing. This hysterically funny and touching book is a follow up to Zeman's Tiny Art Director blog, and captures Zeman's creative endeavors as dictated by his toddler daughter Rosie.
One of my favorite television shows as a kid was "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World," a miniseries that managed to awe me and spook me simultaneously. The premise of the show was simple: examine unexplained events and legends from around the world and attempt to draw conclusions about U.F.O. sightings, Bigfoot, lost civilizations, and other unexplained stories that hover somewhere between fiction and reality.
The moments in each episode that made the greatest impression on me were the interviews with the self-proclaimed experts and researchers who had dedicated themselves to discovering the truth about these phenomena. Some had official titles and degrees, but most were scruffy, wild-eyed men who had spent their adult lives hunting for evidence of creatures, cultures, and places that most people think of as legends. They were simply obsessed with discovering the truth (or something like it).
I was reminded of these individuals when I started David Grann's newest book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. In his first book, a nonfiction account of the hunt for El Dorado, The Lost City of Z, he traced a cast of questionable characters into the Amazon "to record how generations of scientists and adventurers became fatally obsessed" with the hunt for the legendary city. Most never made it back. In The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, Grann focuses on a more eclectic array of obsessive behavior in stories that are truly stranger than fiction. He crafts a fascinating mosaic of obsession, and paints the intense, intelligent, and occasionally unbalanced individuals in his essays in an honest and sympathetic light. It's a fascinating look at the men and women who dedicate their lives to chasing after truths that may or may not exist.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with David to discuss The Devil and Sherlock Holmes and The Lost City of Z. Read on to find out what David thinks about the "infinitely strange" business of writing nonfiction.
Amazon.com: Have you stayed in touch with any of the individuals you wrote about in The Devil and Sherlock
Holmes?
David Grann: In the course of researching the book, I got to know an array of astonishing characters. They
include a marine biologist named Steve O'Shea who was trying to be the first person to ever to capture a giant squid and
grow it in captivity; sandhogs digging an intricate maze of tunnels hundreds of feet beneath the streets of New York City;
a Polish detective investigating whether an author planted clues to an actual murder in his postmodern novel; a fireman who
suffered amnesia on 9/11 and is trying to piece together what happened to him on that tragic day; a baseball icon; cold
killers; an imposter; and a school teacher, Elizabeth Gilbert, who attempted to prove that a man about to be executed for a
deadly fire was really innocent. One of the strange things about reporting is that you spend a lot of time with someone and
then resume your separate lives. But I occasionally hear from several of the characters in the stories. Gilbert, who had
been paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident, recently called to tell me that after more than five years of
rehabilitation she had begun to take steps with the aid of a walker. "I made it eighty yards," she said. "Almost a football
field."
Amazon.com: Given the opportunity, are there any stories you would like to revisit in the future?
David Grann: Most of the pieces hopefully capture the essence of a story and don't need elaboration. But as I
learned from the strange and unexpected twists in these true tales, there is always a possibility that something new and
startling may occur that would draw me back in.
Amazon.com: As a journalist, how does the experience of writing essays differ from writing a longer work like The Lost City of Z?
David Grann: It's very different. With a book, you can follow many different characters and paths. With essays,
you have to keep the lens tightly focused. I really believe that some stories need to be told in longer narrative form, and
others, like the dozen in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, work ideally as shorter pieces.
Amazon.com: Much of your writing revolves around individuals with unusually strong obsessions. The people you
write about have focused their lives on everything from searching for giant squid to disbanding the most powerful gang in
the U.S. prison system. Are there any characteristics that these individuals share?
David Grann: Yes, as you mention, many of the characters are compelled by an obsession, even if the object of
their obsession is very different. The other thing that many of them share is a curiosity and a hunger to explain, like
Sherlock Holmes, the world around them--whether it be the unexplored sea, an underground empire, a secret prison gang, or a
mysterious murder.
Amazon.com: Many of these stories are rooted in ambiguous circumstances. Did your initial impressions change
during the course of researching these people and events?
David Grann: Definitely. When I began investigating these stories, I knew almost nothing about them. Many
originated from little more than a tantalizing hint: a tip from a friend, a reference buried in a news brief. And so I hope
that I take the reader on the same kind of journey that I experienced--a journey that often leads to conclusions that I
never imagined.
Amazon.com: Many of the stories in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes have a "stranger-than-fiction" quality to them.
Have you ever considered trying your hand at fiction, or is the real world strange enough for you?
David Grann: When I first started out as a writer, I had aspirations of becoming a novelist, but I could never
invent compelling enough characters or plots. What's wonderful about nonfiction is I get to meet these incredible
characters--stick up men, sandhogs, prison escape artists, imposters, squid hunters, mobsters, FBI agents--and they allow
me to spend time with them and document their private thoughts. If these dozen stories in the collection taught me
anything, it is that life, to borrow a phrase from Sherlock Holmes, "is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of
They're a year old, so very likely they've been on Omnivoracious before, but these are just fantastic: illustrator M.S. Corley has given some recent children's book covers a redesign in the style of old Penguin editions (you'll need to scroll down past his other excellent cover designs).
I was just ogling Phil Baines's fantastic Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 last weekend, as I do every few months, and thinking that they don't draw 'em like they used to. Corley's re-stylings of Harry Potter, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Lemony Snicket, and others are masterpieces of elusive, suggestive cover design from Penguin's glory days in the '50s and '60s. Have a look, then check out some of the actual Penguin/Pelican cover collections out there. You're welcome!
"She's a traditional storyteller," said Larry Lempert, who heads the jury, adding "it's her way of telling that takes people between imagination and reality." Lempert described Crowther as first and foremost an illustrator and then an author, praising her use of simple materials and tools to illustrate books.
Crowther will receive her prize and a check for five million kronor at a ceremony in Stockholm on June 1.
The Return of the Rainbow?: LaVar Burton is making noise about a possible return of the beloved children's show, Reading Rainbow. But there's a twist: Reading Rainbow 2.0 may be for adults.
Buying a new cookbook is always a little daunting for me. Pictures can make any dish look delicious, but I'm hesitant to invest in a cookbook if I don't know how challenging (or tasty) the recipes are going to be.
That's why I love the idea of getting a taste of a cookbook before buying it. We've made this easy by posting sample recipes, culled from some of our cookbook gems.
Play books! For those of you less invested in the basketball brackets, Audible.com is sponsoring its third annual Tournament of Audiobooks--contenders in four categories are matched up every Tuesday in a round of voting to determine which author-narrator team will be the champion. Check out Audible's weekly recaps to get caught up and cast your votes for the quarterfinalists. Round 3 titles posted today:
Whatever, WoW: Macy Halford is precisely right that the Montreal-based Bite Size Edits is like a video game for writers. Halford is a few levels beyond me--I'm still in the voyeur stage, clicking through to see the range of styles and sentences up for scrutiny and who's posting them--it's not just authors. (You have my permission to edit this news item.)
It's been my great pleasure to have some inkling of the extent to which Daniel Maier-Katkin--former dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University--has immersed himself in the subject matter of his new book Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. The book is the product of several years of inquiry and research, and the final text is a profoundly detailed, complex, and thoughtful view of two controversial figures, the times in which they lived, and the ideas they came to represent.
Who were Arendt and Heidegger? For once, a book's jacket copy is of use: "Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to enoble Man's existence in relation to Death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis. Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was courageous in the time of crisis. Years later, she was even able to forgive Heidegger and to find in his behavior an insight into Nazism that would influence her reflections on 'the banality of evil'--a concept that remains bitterly controversial and profoundly influential to this day."
Stranger from Abroad has already received much praise, including a recent starred review in Booklist, which wrote, "Readers welcoming diverse perspectives will benefit from this inquiry into a relationship uniquely freighted with historical meaning." It's a fascinating book.
I recently interviewed Maier-Katkin via email. For more information, visit the dedicated website, which includes extensive video excerpts.
Amazon.com: Others have written about this subject. What is new or different about your approach?
Maier-Katkin: My approach, especially to Arendt, is more sympathetic than that of most others who have written about her relationship with Heidegger. Richard Wolin, for example, starts from the assumption that Arendt was excessively critical of other Jews and of Israel, and constructs an argument that she was uncomfortable with her own Jewish identity, felt more German than Jewish, and that this was somehow explained by her love for Martin Heidegger. Other critics have been more hostile, characterizing Arendt as a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew because she conceived of the complicity of ordinary Germans with Nazi evil as somehow "banal," and because she argued that Israeli militarism was more likely to result in some cataclysm for the Jewish people than in perpetual domination of the Middle East through raw power.
I don't see Arendt as having been hostile to Israel. She had a long personal history of working for Zionist organizations, and even when she was most critical, characterized herself as the "loyal opposition." From this perspective Arendt's challenge to the Jewish leadership, arguing that the leadership had put the Jewish people on a path that leads toward disaster, does not seem hostile, anti-Semitic or self-hating so much as courageous.
There remains the question of how she could have forgiven Martin Heidegger with whom she had a love affair in 1925, and who became an enthusiastic Nazi at least for a few years in the 1930s. Arendt's detractors have used this as evidence that she loved all things German more than anything Jewish, that her judgment was distorted, and that when such a person criticizes Israel, it is not to be taken seriously. I have examined Heidegger's behavior during the Nazi years carefully, with an eye to presenting evidence from which readers can make their own judgment about whether he was the sort of German with whom reconciliation after World War II and the Holocaust was possible.
Certainly he was not a war criminal, and in Germany in general was welcomed back into the civilized community. I have tried to make it possible for readers to understand the complex relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, and form their own judgments about the reconciliation between them.
Amazon.com: How did your opinions change based on your research on both parties?
Maier-Katkin: I knew relatively little about Heidegger at the beginning of this project. I came around to the position that he was an opportunist and a liar, and also a German nationalist with an elevated view of the magnificence of German culture, especially the German language and German philosophy, and that his behavior during the Nazi years was despicable. I did not come around to the view, however, that the whole corpus of his thinking about human existence should therefore be dismissed. In addition, as I read Heidegger I could understand why Arendt had fallen in love with him when she was young and why she was reluctant to write him out of her life and unwilling to write him out of intellectual history.
I knew a little more about Arendt--or at least about her thought--at the beginning of the project, but as I learned more about her life, especially from reading thousands of pages of her letters, I was especially taken by the quality of her friendships with such amazingly interesting people as Karl Jaspers, Kurt Blumenfeld, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, and her quite remarkable husband Heinrich Blücher, of whom she said that wherever she was in the world, and however dangerous it was (escaping from Nazi occupied France, for example), that when she was with him, she felt secure as within her own four walls. Most of all, I think, I was taken by the strength of Arendt's friendships. In the purely intellectual realm, I suppose, I was most taken by her thinking about the perpetual possibility of new beginnings even in a deeply troubled world. These two commitments, I think, to friendship and to the possibility of starting over again, go a long way to help understand how she was able to reconcile with Martin Heidegger.
Amazon.com: What was it like to more or less live with these two people for an extended period of time?
Maier-Katkin: What a wonderful question. I did feel that I was living with Arendt and Heidegger for several years--more so with Arendt (whose picture is on the wall next to my desk) than Heidegger (whose thinking and language I came to appreciate but who never became a sympathetic character to me).
But it's not just the two of them. Readers of Stranger From Abroad will also see that I was living with Heinrich Blücher (who is really a heroic figure in my telling of the story) and also with Arendt's best loved friends, which means that I was intimate "across the distance the world puts between us" with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the poet Randall Jarrell, and the writer Mary McCarthy among others. This, as your question seems to recognize, was a great spiritual and intellectual adventure.
Amazon.com: What would you hope readers would take away from the book?
Maier-Katkin: This is a difficult question. Most of all, I think, I'd like the readers to enjoy the story and to come away inoculated against the calumny that Arendt was a self-hating, anti-Semitic enemy of Israel. It would be nice if some readers incorporated elements of Arendt's thinking about justice into their own being, and thought about what justice means in domestic policy and international politics. I'd be happy too if readers came away from the book thinking a bit more about Arendt's conception of the new beginning and how it can be realized in the lives of individuals and nations. I'd be very happy if readers found themselves wondering about some of the same things I've been wondering about, principally about how to explain what happened to the Germans: how did a nation of "thinkers and poets" with great accomplishments in the arts, sciences, music and philosophy become perpetrators of mass murder and other crimes against humanity? That question is certainly present in Stranger From Abroad, and I hope to be addressing it more directly in my next book. It would also please me if reading Stranger From Abroad left readers wanting to know a little more about Heinrich Blücher because I plan to spend some more time with him over the months and years ahead.
Sunday Book Review cover: David Carr on Backing into Forward by Jules Feiffer: "While other accomplished men bronze their success or dip it in amber, Feiffer treats his own as one big, wonderful caper.... Feiffer did not wait for fame to find him at a lunch counter or in a mailroom. He sought it out, anticipating its every aspect, and when it came his way, he grabbed it with both hands. It is a good life he's had, and in 'Backing Into Forward,' well told in every respect."
Gregory Cowles on A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks: "It tells you everything you need to know about the politics of this book, and the reflexive populism of our time, that the capitalist is more reliably loathsome than the jihadist.... Faulks manages to invest the financial arcana with more drama than you might expect. When a novelist tells multiple stories, it's common to describe him as a weaver, knotting threads into a tapestry. Faulks, though, is more like a bomb-maker, twisting wires; we keep reading not so much because we want to see the big picture but because we're pretty sure something is going to blow up."
Justin Cartwright on Occupied City by David Peace: "Both the reader and the fictional writer "” is it David Peace himself? "” are tightly wound in something intensely claustrophobic. I felt as if I were lost, not in Tokyo, but in a particular kind of pulp fiction fantasy. Mercifully, it soon became apparent that 'Occupied City' is an extraordinary and highly original crime novel, based on a notorious true-life poisoning of bank workers in occupied Tokyo in 1948.... Peace presumably intends for all this repetition to lend his book a lyrical authenticity and poetic exoticism, but really it makes him sound like Rain Man. But stick with him. Once you get past the irritation and the claustrophobia the language sometimes induces, this is a truly remarkable work. It is hugely daring, utterly irresistible, deeply serious and unlike anything I have ever read."
Garner on Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt: "Mr. Judt's new book, 'Ill Fares the Land,' is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man's sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens' lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book's bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy your floors. But 'Ill Fares the Land' is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the United States and Britain have meant "” and can continue to mean "” to their people and to the world."
Garner on Lonelyhearts by Marion Meade: "Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney were a defiantly odd couple, a literary mandarin and a cornfed girl from the Midwest who didn't care much for books. They're an odd couple too for a dual biography of the kind Marion Meade delivers with 'Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney.' It's a book that might have worked too, if Ms. Meade's grating prose didn't drag it down at every turn.... To hear her tell this story is like listening to someone play Aaron Copland on a kazoo."
Washington Post:
Yardley on In the Company of Angels by Thomas E. Kennedy: "'In the Company of Angels' -- I leave it to you to discover the explanation for the title -- is powerful and of the moment. Since it was originally published in Denmark in 2004, I suspect it was inspired by torture conducted by the American government in Iraq and Guantanamo, but I didn't detect a whiff of political or ideological posturing in it. Kennedy writes clean, evocative prose, and an occasional note of humor leavens this dark novel. He is a writer to be reckoned with, and it's about time the reckoning got underway in the country of his birth."
Dirda on The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: "Generally, novels make us turn the pages because we want to know what happens next. But with Sam Lipsyte's 'The Ask,' we turn the pages because we want to know what's going to happen in the next sentence.... Because Lipsyte's firecracker prose is so much fun to read, one can almost overlook all the heartbreak in his brilliant novel. Almost. In the end, the dazzle simply highlights the darkness and the despair."
Charles on So Much for That by Lionel Shriver: "If Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat. Not only does her new book wrestle with actual laws and prices (COBRA! co-pays! out-of-network deductibles!), but it reminds us just how politically argumentative a novel can be.... My reaction to the novel was schizophrenic: There were times, honestly, when I felt I couldn't read another page without getting sick myself.... And yet I admire that what she's done here is without a dose of sentimentality. Yes, it's gangling and pedantic and far, far too long, but its anger is infectious."
Los Angeles Times:
Carolyn Kellogg on Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories by Caroline Blackwood: "It is clear that we read for pleasure; what is less obvious are the varieties of pleasures we experience. Pleasing isn't always pleasant. Take Caroline Blackwood's stories -- they are rare in their brutal exposure and are deeply troubling to read. Yet 'Never Breathe a Word' is nothing less than a marvelous slide into an emotional abyss."
Tod Goldberg on Next by James Hynes: "[A]t first 'Next' seems to be just an exceptionally well-written comic novel about middle age. But with great subtlety and nuance, Hynes begins to move the narrative into deeper, more compelling territory until the reader comes to find that Kevin isn't merely looking for sex, he's looking for a reason for his life, an order to his mistakes, a compelling set of answers to the questions he's avoided addressing.... 'Next' is sui generis -- an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare; a novel that is about us, all of us, living our lives in the mayhem of our own particular drama, inevitably blind to the surrounding mayhem until it is much too late."
Howard Hampton on Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen: "[I]f Aaronovitch does a decent job of exposing the lies underpinning these jerry-built myths, his peevish, plodding common sense is hardly a match for the burning near-religiosity that not only makes a Communion wafer of JFK's assassination, but also extends to the overdose death of one-time Kennedy paramour Marilyn Monroe.... Excavating the visceral, reductive urges of the 'I want to believe' mind-set -- the need to translate everything into the neat pieces of some gigantic X-File -- isn't Aaronovitch's strongest suit.... Francis Wheen's 'Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia' more effectively captures how conspiracy theories and botched conspiracies such as Watergate entered the collective psyche. Throughout the decade, dark mutterings and dreadful events, like a backdoor form of pop culture, seemed to mutually reinforce everyone's worst suspicions."
Globe and Mail:
Bernard Kelly on Muriel Spark by Martin Stannard: "Could it be that Spark objected to Stannard's work principally on the matter of style? Her adult personality was a reflection of her style (rather than the reverse), and she approached writing, hers and others', with something like the mental rigour of a Miss Brodie. Stannard doesn't write badly, but his voice is omnipresent, paraphrasing her letters, supplementing her reflections, following her younger selves down corridors where the light had been extinguished and the key turned in the lock. Appropriating what had always been hers alone."
The Guardian:
Hilary Mantel on Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapir "As he conducts us through the pretensions of the Baconians, the Marlovians, the Oxfordians, and on through the latest internet conspiracy theories, ... Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts, about the actors of Shakespeare's company, about Elizabethan printers and their methods, about what Shakespeare's manuscripts reveal about how his plays and stagecraft worked. These details, in the chapter which he devotes to Shakespeare himself, are the most riveting part of his book. The contrarian theories, faithfully and respectfully reported, become less interesting as they slide beyond parody."
Gregory Norminton on The Wilding by Maria McCann: "To reveal more would be to weaken the central strength of McCann's novel: its taut and compelling plot. Family mysteries are 10-a-penny in many genres, yet here, without doing anything radically original, McCann traps us in her web of gradual revelation. Engaging characterisation and the deferred gratification of discovery keep us reading to a bittersweet ending. It is an intensely enjoyable experience."
The New Yorker:
Jane Mayer on Courting Disaster by Marc Thiessen: "The book, whose cover features a blurb from Cheney, has become the unofficial Bible of torture apologists. 'Courting Disaster' has a scholarly feel, and hundreds of footnotes, but it is based on a series of slipshod premises.... The publication of 'Courting Disaster' suggests that Obama's avowed determination 'to look forward, not back' has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn't protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it."
New York Review of Books:
Margaret Atwood on Anthill by E.O. Wilson: "What to make of Anthill ? Part epic-inspired adventure story, part philosophy-of-life, part many-layered mid-century Alabama viewed in finely observed detail, part ant life up close, part lyrical hymn to the wonders of earth, part contribution to the growing genre of eco-lit: yes, all these. But hidden within Anthill is also a sort of instruction manual. Here's an effective way of saving the planet, one anthill at a time, as it were.... Despite the seriousness of the warning he means to convey, I believe Edward O. Wilson had a fine time writing his first novel. It shows in the exuberance of the prose, and in the inventiveness of the plot. And"”with the exception of small stretches of awkwardness and preachiness"”the reader will have a great time reading it. Certainly I did."
Jennifer Scheussler on Lipsyte's The Ask: "If the action lacks much forward progress, The Ask succeeds as a series of brilliant riffs and satirical set pieces, skewering progressive preschools, reality TV, Brooklyn hipsters, conceptual art, natural childbirth, self-righteous foodies, and politically correct office culture, along with just about everything else. The targets are sometimes soft, but Lipsyte's prose arrows fly with gloriously weird spin, tracing punch-drunk curlicues before hitting their marks"”or landing in some nearby alternate universe."
Edmund White on Cheever and Cheever: "The vitality and fantasy of Cheever's writing, even when he is at his most serious, stand in complete contrast to the despair and loneliness and boredom of his life. What was it that allowed him to transform all this dullness into art? My own answer may sound trivializing but I would say it was his knack for writing seductively about the world of the senses"”its colors and associations, its sexiness and its smells (above all, its smells!), not to mention its suave beauty, at once transitory and eternal in a way that Wallace Stevens understood in that paradoxical line of 'Peter Quince at the Clavier': 'The body dies; the body's beauty lives.'"
A few years ago, Steven Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) wrote a post on the New York Times Freakonomics blog entitled "How Much Do Book Blurbs Matter?" In the post, he wrote, "Lately, I've come to believe that they really don't matter at all," as many blurbs are actually crafted by a book's editor on behalf of well-known authors solicited to lend their name to help a book sell.
The folks at AmazonEncore are taking a different approach to book blurbs as they prepare to rerelease Eric Kraft's Herb 'n' Lorna, which acquired a small, passionate following after its initial publication in 1988. We asked readers to tell us why they keep coming back to Herb 'n' Lorna, and why they continue to love the book more than 20 years later.
Readers submitted their book blurbs, and now we need your help. Tell us which blurb makes you want to read the book, and help one lucky reader get their name and submission on the back cover of the upcoming edition of Herb 'n' Lorna. Submit your vote by March 26, 2010, and next week we'll tell you which blurb won.
Scene 1: "The Trials of Arabella": Ian McEwan is adapting Atonement into an opera with two friends, poet Craig Raine and composer Michael Berkeley: "If you were thinking of a large-scale opera then what springs to mind is 380,000 troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. That would be quite a choir." (Via the Literary Saloon)
Elite Eight: Back to tourney talk (oh, my Terps...): The opening match of the second round of the Tournament of Books pits the most popular novel of 2009 (The Help) against probably the most acclaimed (Let the Great World Spin). What do the judges think? As often, the color commentary is more interesting and nuanced (Book Review Bingo players, take note!) than the actual judge's comment.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Spur Awards for the best Western books were announced, including a prize for former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor for her autobiographical picture book, Finding Susie.
Moving and shaking: Nobody would have expected The Spanish Inquisition, the out-of-print hardcover edition of Henry Kamen's revisionist history, to rise into our top 300 bestsellers, and to the top of our Movers & Shakers list, but this morning it has, for reasons unknown.
