Books

Jeff VanderMeer brings the cat out of the open bag, into the light: Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts) is Stephen King’s son.

Jeff’s right in that most everybody knew, but I’ve seen at least a couple of people find out who were SHOCKED, even people who’d met Hill. And after the Variety thing, it seemed odd that there were still blog posts disappearing that referenced this.

I do wonder if any of the reviewers (and there were several) who compared Hill’s work to King’s in their reviews actually didn’t know — perhaps they were all just being sly.

I have to say I was not surprised at all when I first found out about this. After reading "Best New Horror" and before knowing anything about who Hill was, I said to Christopher, "It’s going to turn out this is Stephen King writing under a pseudonym or something." But the reality’s much better, I think. And it’s time people are talking about this openly. So many people knew that even one not feels dishonest. The point has been made. The writing speaks for itself.

Today the postal service brought a galley of Elizabeth Hand‘s Saffron and Brimstone: strange stories from M Press, which made me very, very, very happy. (This is an expansion of her award-winning collection from PS Publishing, Bibliomancy, which we were never quite able to get our hands on, so double yay.)

Earlier this week, Gwyneth Jones sent along copies of Bold As Love and Castles Made of Sand, which also made me very, very, very happy. Both these packages were the best kind of suprises.

And we went to the bookstore, with me whining, but I don’t want any more books, I really feel ill about it, but I have too many great books sitting at home, I don’t even want to buy any more today. So, I picked up Rachel Cohn & David Levithan’s Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist the moment I saw it, bought it immediately, without thought, and started it right away. Oh, you know how most people write about music and it’s just cringe-inducing? It’s just dancing about architecture? This book just nails it; starts out with the titular Nick playing bass in a club and SELLS it. The antithesis of cringing. (And I’m now obessed with tracking down everything Levithan’s ever written — if someone sent me a copy of Wide Awake I would pledge undying devotion. Or something.)

(I also almost bought Annette Kurtis Clause’s Freaks: Alive on the Inside! (title – eh, but freaks! and Blood and Chocolate is fab). But we have an ER bill coming. So maybe next time.)

And I’ve been reading The King’s Last Song. So so so good. There are few writers whose work, no matter what it is, instantly makes me fall in love. Geoff Ryman’s one of them. (Karen Fowler and Kelly Link are two others. Christopher, of course. Eduardo Galeano. I should probably make a real list. But suffice to say there are a very few that don’t seem capable of disappointing me.)

Happy reading.

ps Finished this entry after drinking wine and soaking in pollen outside. Important to note in case of incoherence. ‘Night.

Drag me away. There are some beautiful photos from photographer John Hockensmith’s new book Gypsy Horses and the Travelers’ Way: The Road to Appleby Fair up online accompanying this article. (I can’t vouch for the writing, but I’ll probably go hear his talk this weekend.)

Democracy Now! interviews Eduardo Galeano about all sorts of things:

EDUARDO GALEANO: I never decided. It’s something — I’m written by my books. I mean, they write me, so I never decide anything. Well, I was always looking for a language who could integrate everything that has been culturally divorced from, for instance, heart and mind. So I was looking for a feel-thinking language, sentipensante, “feel-thinking.” It’s a word. I didn’t invent the word. It’s a word I heard years ago in the Colombian coast. A fisherman told me, "Hay gigrere en las palabras sentipensantes," when I told him I was a writer. "Ah, you’re a writer." "Yes." "Oh." And he asked me if I was using a sentipensante language, a feel-thinking language. And so, he was a master. I mean, I learned a lot from this sentence forever. I am a sentipensante.

I think one of the divorces that has avoided a full integration of human condition is this divorce between our emotions and our ideas. In other divorces, separating journalists, for instance, literary journalists, saying, well, this is an essay. This is a poem. This is a novel. This is an — I don’t know what. And I don’t believe in frontiers. I think that in no — I don’t believe at all in frontiers. And then, how would I practice the alguanas, I would say, the immigration controls between literary journalists? I believe that —

AMY GOODMAN: You don’t believe in borders.

EDUARDO GALEANO: No. I think that when the world — perhaps one day the world, the world, our world, won’t be upside down, and then any newborn human being will be welcome. Saying, "Welcome. Come. Come in. Enter. The entire earth will be your kingdom. Your legs will be your passport, valid forever." And for me, this is true also for words. I mean, the same thing with words, persons, words. I really believe in the universal dimension of human condition, not globalization, which is the universal dimension of money, but the universal dimension of our human passions.

There’s soccer stuff too, of course. (Via Austin Kleon.)

I want his new book Voices of Time so badly; it sounds very Book of Embraces, which is the best, loveliest book ever. Oh, and he also says this in the interview:

We are all making each day, being as we are, obliged to live life as a duty, but secretly willing to live it as a feast.

And then this:

And these new ways are exploding in the contemporary world and opening, broadening the spaces for independent expressions. I now repentido, because I didn’t believe in it at the beginning. I mean, I mistrusted it, all this internet and so on, the cybernetic new ways of — no, I was against it, because I always had a strong suspicion that machines drink at night. When nobody sees them, they drink.

I love this man.

A remarkable story in the WaPo about a tape of a 1966 Pablo Neruda reading that was missing for 40 years before someone started looking. It’s been found:

But what the poet read at the Library of Congress was quick and almost simple when compared with the rich and long version Neruda presented for the IDB. Holding tight to the IDB tape, Dorn said, "It’s much better than what he read at the library."

In the summer of 1966, she was a 20-year-old who had just come to work at the library. That June day, Neruda did his reading, had lunch with poet Stephen Spender, then returned to Dorn’s office and asked, she said, "Can I see the papers of Walt Whitman?"

Gavin breaks the news that one Ms. Kelly Link is a finalist for this year’s Young Lions Award. The nominees are:

Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
Ander Monson, Other Electricities*
Eric Puchner, Music Through the Floor

YAY!

(*I also really, really liked this one.)

And it’s Neal Pollack. Over at Slate a bunch of writers name their favorite beach reading and:

Neal Pollack, author, Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel – His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne Of Jade, and Black Powder War by Naomi Novik: All right, I’ll admit to really grinding up the geek machine. I’m settling in with a trilogy about an air war, with dragons, between England and France in the 1800s. These books, combined with my rapidly disappearing hairline and the presence of my 3-year-old son, will make me the hottest ticket in Malibu this summer.

Oh, how wonderful! His Majesty’s Dragon was the best airplane book ever last weekend (see top of column to left). I plan to read Throne of Jade in the car tomorrow. And I’m dead jealous if he’s already got Black Powder War.

Now this is a new one. Talking Squid reviews bookmarks lying around the house:

I never say no to a free bookmark, yet somehow when I need one, all I can find is a dog eared train ticket or a bit of lint from my coat pocket. My house is full of bookmarks stacked in little piles, just waiting for the opportunity to mark my page. There’s a handful of the darn things in my desk drawer here, so apropos of nothing I thought I’d write a review of them and rate them according to aesthetics, functionality and durability.

I love it.

(Thanks, Scott!)

Where to start?

I forgot to take a camera.

I knew going in that with only a day and a half of BEA time, there’d be a lot of people I’d regret not getting to spend more time rapping with — and I was right. In this category place nearly all the litbloggers on hand, Cecil Castellucci, Anne Ishii of Vertical, the hilarious M.T. "Tobin" Anderson (who has excellent socks) and a ton of other people, some of whose names I don’t even remember. Then there were people I got to spend a decent amount of time chatting with, but still greedily wish there’d been more; in this category, find the divine Ms. Pinky, style goddess Lauren Cerand, Matt Cheney, Max of the Millions, Holly and Theo Black (Wiscon!), Ed Champion (if not Mr. Segundo), etc. But, honestly, it felt like a week! Here I sit with a hoarse throat (more on that) and happiness to be home. Some things about BEA, in numbered list format, at least until that proves unsustainable.

1. Wandering the floor at BEA what I most felt like was a shoplifter. No, seriously. You’re just kind of meandering through crowds and grabbing books and stuffing them in your bag. At the big publisher booths, I even found myself avoiding the eyes of some of the booth workers. I am stealing from you, I thought, why don’t you stop me?

2. Why doesn’t D.C. have a smoking ordinance? I’m still talking like a husky-voiced man from all the loud, smoky bar time.

3. I think the publishing industry should be run more like Wiscon. Bake sales would seriously improve things.

4. That said, scary suit people aside, the vast majority of people were knowledgeable, nice book people. It’s a trade show, basically, so you have all these niche ghettos all over the place, but well, it’s a trade show, so of course you do.

5. Where was the SF? Basically, the pimpin’ stylin’ Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books was the only one to represent. The major publishers had a barely (if) there presence in support of fantasy and science fiction. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say that it was the least-represented of any of the main genres that have their own little section in the bookstore. Disappointing and I fear self-perpetuating of the flattish sales and fear of the "state of the field" everyone always talks about.

6. One thing that BEA did do usefully was provide a big fishbowl example of word of mouth in motion. Everyone talks to everyone about which galleys to get, which booths are good, who’s signing when, which covers are terrible and books are absentee. I’d wager this is the most effective part of the show in terms of creating the much-coveted "buzz" about a book. It certainly seemed to impact which ARCs went more quickly than others. Of course, my sample size is small. But when you have to think about how to get two boxes worth of books home, you want the books to be good. I’m sure there are people who just grab everything, but most people I saw were being uber-selective.

7.  Speaking of which, Kelly and Gavin are being nice enough to get my books to Wiscon next weekend so I can’t post a list of what I got. The ones I brought home to read in the meantime were: John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines (so, so good! and such a pretty cover!); Tobin Anderson’s highly recommended The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party; Ysabeau Wilce’s also highly recommended  Flora Segunda: The Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog; and Scott Westerfeld’s continuation of the Peepsverse The Last Days. Which I now realize are all YAs. In fact, there were a great deal of excellent YAs available. But I got lots of Books for Adults too.

8. Got some info on the Vermont College low res MFA program in YA/children’s writing from people in the know. I’m applying. Don’t tell anyone. (Vermont people, send me more dirt.)

9. I think I was lucky to not feel untethered and overwhelmed by the hugeness of things (though seriously, a trade show for anything is huge, right? I expected it to be bigger!), because Kelly and Gavin and Alan were there and so it felt a bit like a family reunion and familiar. The Super 8 we shared a room at was AWESOME and by that I mean an awesome topic of conversation. Craig Gidney informed us that the rooms are rentable by the hour. The clerk sits behind bulletproof glass. On Saturday night I skipped out earlyish (midnight), leaving the others to the PGW party so I could grab four hours of sleep, and there was an honest-to-god motorcycle gang zooming past for the first hour I tried to go to winkland. (And when Matt Cheney and I were getting our books signed by Tobin Anderson he asked me how the room by the hour was and the other people in line looked very confused.)

10. Alan DeNiro debut rock star, represent! Seriously, guys. He went through two and a half boxes of books at his signing on Friday. It was many kinds of excellent.

11. People in the rest of publishing drink even more than SF people do, but they don’t seem to actually eat anything. It’s insane.

12. The prom at the Hyatt YA drinks night on Friday was the absolute best, best, best-dressed prom ever. Seriously. Made my weekend. Even the pregnant girls were super-styling. Trust Cecil to inadvertently provide such fine entertainment.

13. Tom Doyle is a stand-up guy. He got us bottled water. (No bottled water at the Super 8. Or irons (you could burn a hooker with that). Or hair dryers (um). But it had a great shower(yeah).)

14. I got to meet several of the people I interviewed for my little PW Show Daily pieces (it’s the newsletter Publishers Weekly hands out free at BEA) and they were all exceedingly nice. Janis Cooke Newman happened to be signing copies of Mary when we wandered by the MacAdam/Cage booth and was pleased her son was mentioned (after all, it’s not every kid who’s obsessed with John Wilkes Booth and manages to serve as inspiration for both a memoir and a novel). The Soho Press folks reminded me about their cocktail party and I snagged a couple of squirt guns and ARCs from them.

15. The publicists I met were all wonderful and since they don’t get enough praise… Let us all recognize the extreme excellence of Unbridled Books‘ Caitlin Hamilton Summie, who talks about books as intelligently as anyone I know and always tries her best to target books to individual bloggers’ tastes. (And they have some great-looking books on the way.) Coffee House Press publicist Molly Mikolowski was also fabulous — and the publisher (I believe) told me he thinks litblogs are an unqualified good thing for the book world (plus, they had gummi rats at their booth!). And MacAdam/Cage’s Julie Burton is great too. There were lots more.  Sing their praises.

16. The first things I saw at BEA were: Helen Thomas (I shook her hand while buying a much-needed emergency sandwich (see # 11)) and a sevenish-year-old kid dressed in a tailored suit followed by his dad in the exact same adult-sized version of the suit sans the kid’s red ribbon that said Author.

17. Dogs are hot. Really hot.

18. I love you all. Goodnight, Washington!

p.s. Panels? I didn’t go to no stinking panels!

All is business around these parts today, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to the best "reading guide" to ever come along with a book. It’s “The Cabana on the Lake of the Dead” Drinking Games and Reading Guide, companion to Alan DeNiro‘s debut collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. I understand bootlegs will be available at BEA.