Put On Your Crown

Set your alarm clocks, dust off the teapot, and pop to the shops for some crumpets: Prince William and Kate Middleton get married on Friday (at 6 a.m. EST)! Personally, I won’t be watching—I’m firmly wed to my bed, and nothing will tear us asunder before 8 a.m. on weekdays—but I will definitely be spending a lot of Friday gobbling up all the photographs and breathless reportage. What dress did she wear? Which tiara did she pick? Did they really put a disco ball up in the Palace? HOW LONG WAS THE KISS, AND WAS THERE TONGUE?

It’s incredibly alluring, this notion that the bride will walk into Westminster Abbey as Kate and walk out as Princess Catherine. After all, we have been inculcated since birth with the myth of royal metamorphosis. Our ancestors were, too: spend any time with folk tale scholars and you will soon see how nearly all cultures seem to have, or have had, a version of this transformation in their literature. Contemporary Western fantasies can be traced back to the 17th century, when Charles Perrault immortalized stories like Cendrillon, ou La petite Pantoufle de Verre in his collection of fairy tales; although he is considered responsible for the addition of the pumpkin (reading up on pumpkin symbolism is actually really interesting, by the way), his inspiration clearly came from past cultures. Writing in the 1st Century B.C., the Greek historian Strabo tells in Book 17, Chapter One, of his Geography the story of Rhodopis, the "Egyptian Cinderella." (Claudius Aelianus—Aelian—also mentions Rhodopis in Varia Historia). There is a Chinese story called "Ye Xian," dated 850 A.D., that follows the Cinderella plot, and a Gaelic legend.

Prince William's new bride would do well to read up on the origins of the princess myth, but I'd also suggest that she study its more contemporary iterations. I expect she's already read A Little Princess—Frances Hodgson Burnett's endearing, if a bit overly moralistic, exploration of what it really means to be royal. As young Sara Crewe proclaims:

“Whatever comes,” she said, “cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."

Princess Catherine can also turn to biography. The critically-lauded Hannah Pakula introduces us to"Vicky," Queen Victoria's beloved eldest daughter, in An Uncommon Woman (which I highly recommend), while Tina Brown takes us back to the more recent past in her infamous book The Diana Chronicles.

But what of us, the commoners who will always remain so, despite our childhood wishes for a prince? Again, we can turn to the inimitable Sara Crewe for comfort:

"I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young. They're still princesses. All of us."

(Or we can go here.)

The Touch of a Woman

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of a novel called The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. It’s been on the New York Times Fiction Bestseller List for a staggering 102 weeks (as of 3/27/11), and has been optioned by Steven Spielberg. Stockett has rocketed to literary celebrity, but The Help’s success has also put another name on the map—that of Amy Einhorn.

In the twenty years since she graduated from Stanford, Einhorn has amassed a formidable résumé that should inspire even the most forlorn editorial assistant; she began at FSG and rose all the way up to Editor-in-Chief at Hachette behemoth Grand Central Publishing. However, a few years ago Penguin approached her with an offer that I don’t think anyone could refuse—that of her own imprint. She moved to 375 Hudson Street in 2007, and launched Amy Einhorn Books in 2009.

And what a launch it was: The Help was one of the imprint’s first titles, boasting a simply intertwined lower-case “a” and “e” logo on its spine. It must have been a hard act to follow, but several of Einhorn’s more recent books, such as The Postmistress and The Weird Sisters, have also hit the list (though admittedly not with the soaring staying power of The Help).

With its record of stunning success, Amy Einhorn Books is firmly established as an imprint. In fact, I think Amy Einhorn Books is more accurately described as a brand, in that the presence of its logo seems to function as a Good Housekeeping Seal for readers—last year, a group of bloggers kicked off the “Amy Einhorn Perpetual Reading Challenge” on Twitter, encouraging people to read their way through the entire catalog. Although a mix of fiction and nonfiction, her titles share common sensibilities despite their varying subjects, and readers seem to have picked up on this identifiable aesthetic.

Amy Einhorn Books, however, is far from the first eponymous boutique imprint to be helmed by a female editor. Nan A. Talese Books (Doubleday), Reagan Arthur Books (Little, Brown), and Sarah Crichton Books (FSG) are some of its most recognizable predecessors, all founded by women who are venerated in publishing circles for their charisma and talent. I don’t think you’d have to throw a stone too far to hit a young editrix with a small “woman-crush” on, say, Reagan (ahem).

It’s interesting to consider the brand power of these imprints alongside their function within the larger context of their parent house/imprint. Once upon a time, there was a Nelson Doubleday; a Roger Straus, a John Farrar, and a Robert Giroux; an Alfred A. Knopf; a Charles Scribner; a Charles Coffin Little and a James Brown. One can easily forget that the imprints bearing these names were once small ventures, too, each defined by the personality and editorial taste of their founders. But will their trajectory of growth and power be followed by this new school of lady imprints? In fifty years, will we be referring just to “Talese” and “Arthur”? Will “Einhorn” in its turn be a maternal umbrella for other smaller imprints?

Equally worthy of discussion is whether or not there will space in the industry for my publishing generation to produce its own personality-driven imprints in twenty years’ time. Despite the success of Einhorn and Arthur, there is also a trend now towards more concept-oriented imprints, like Twelve and the short-lived HarperStudio. Are ideas, rather than people, now the bigger draw?

What also intrigues me is that both of these imprints were started by men. Given that the industry’s biggest houses and imprints are named after men, is it now considered un-politically correct by the industry for a younger generation of male editors to found new imprints boasting their names? Or does this difference stem from the common theory that women read more books, especially more fiction, than do men, and therefore that a name-brand imprint led by a woman has more influence in the marketplace?

I raise all these questions not to provide rhetorical flourishes, but because I honestly can’t answer them. I don’t think anyone really can. I just hope that Amy and Reagan and Nan and Sarah continue to rock on, and allow their taste to sing out loudly in this crowded bookstore of a world.

Franzen Takes a Bullet, Snooki Writes a Novel, and Other January Joys

Well, it’s January. Ba-dump. The original Gray Lady. Time to purge the system of yesteryear’s excesses: take a break from the booze and cut down on chocolate consumption, make it to bed at a reasonable hour, and drink more water.

It’s depressing, isn’t it—the walk to the subway through the Christmas tree graveyard, the dirty banks of plowed snow, marbled yellow by dog piss (and human, judging from the guy I saw peeing into a snowdrift outside the 14th St. A/C station), that are slowly oozing out into the street. One must turn inward for comfort, and seek solace in domestic distractions. Here are the welcoming arms of the bookshelf, the internet, and the television. To begin, the first and the last combine themselves: A Shore Thing, Snooki’s fiction debut, goes on-sale today! Get it now, and you’ll have two days to read before the premiere of the Jersey Shore’s third season on January 6th.

Once you’ve got your book and your TV on, turn to the internet—and the lists of books to watch in 2011. The Daily Beast has come out with a rather myopic list, so for greater scope head over to The Millions and see what they’re panting for this year. And finally, Electric Literature takes a rather unusual look back to find out, literally, if FREEDOM (and other 2010 titles) will stop a bullet.

Happy Tuesday.

It's a Dealbreaker!

Back in June (oh, those days of sunshine and roses seem so far away…), the lovely Carmen wrote an interesting post about how people’s reading choices influence their potential as romantic prospects. It is a debate that’s been ongoing for a while now, a literary riff on Liz Lemon’s catchphrase: “It’s a Dealbreaker, ladies!” His favorite book is The Shack? Dealbreaker. Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn are the only novels she’s read this year? Hella dealbreaker.

There’s something so fascinating about going to people’s apartments and having a good root through their bookshelves. It’s more socially acceptable than rummaging around in the medicine cabinet, but just as revealing: you can see which titles are well-thumbed and which are pristine, covered in a thin layer of dust. Books give away interests and passions, college courses taken and itineraries of travels past. As I wrote before in my post on book collecting, the volumes on the shelves tell the story of a life.

A couple of years ago, some enterprising folks launched a website called Goodreads, where people can assemble virtual bookshelves and talk about what they’re currently reading. The idea is that you can noodle around and learn more about people by what they post, but the actual point of it is, at least to me, unclear.

Goodreads is primarily a social networking site: although you can see some content by just browsing, you actually have to be “friends” with people to see everything they have to say. This is a fairly intimate platform, without any of the superficial agenda of LinkedIn or even Facebook, so if you’re “friends” with someone on Goodreads, isn’t there a good chance you know them in real life? Why do you need a special forum to talk about books with your friends?

However, someone recently introduced me to an incarnation of this “public bookshelf” concept that makes total sense. It’s an internet dating website called Alikewise, which allows users to build profiles based on what they’ve read and are currently reading. It speaks to Carmen’s observations, and more broadly to the general consensus that if two people’s bookshelves aren’t compatible, they probably aren’t either. In some ways it’s like a traditional dating website, in that you post a photograph and a short description of yourself. But its format is refreshingly quirky—a clear example of how structure can foster, rather than stifle, personality and creativity.

Every profile has two tabs. The first is a bookshelf on which you can display titles and a short explanation to go with them. People interpret this feature quite freely: some people write about what they’re reading now, whereas others choose to focus on their favorite books. I don’t want to quote from anybody’s profile without their permission, so I’ll let you browse through at your leisure. The other tab is labeled “His/Her Story,” and serves as the “personal statement”—except that statement has to take the form of answers to six specific questions:

I would describe myself as...
When people meet me, they notice...
You'll often find me...
Two things I can't live without...
The bravest thing I've done recently...
I am particularly good at...

At first glance these questions might seem asinine, but seeing how people choose to respond—whether seriously or flippantly, in depth or with brevity—is not only interesting, but also very revealing. It beats eHarmony’s crapulous Personality Profile any day in terms of depth and insight.

Browsing Alikewise is endlessly fascinating, a perfect occupation for a rainy Friday. You can search by demographic (a/s/l, as internet chatroom loiterers call it); by author; or by book title. Even if you’re not trolling for a date, it’s refreshing to see so many readers within a culture that is supposedly mourning the demise of books. There are the expected quantities of people reading Eat, Pray, Love and Freedom, but I was surprised by the breadth of taste and affinity. Some people do conform gloriously to the stereotypes (which is why we have them, right?), but the website does debunk a lot of the assumptions we can be tempted to make about the audience of a particular book. And, for the most part, people's comments were insightful, eloquent explanations of their choices that I respect, even if those choices would not be my own.

I can't really enjoy the full Alikewise "experience" because I'm currently not in the market for a new love object. If I were an intrepid New York Times journalist, I'd probably make a fake profile and see what happened, but honestly I can find neither the energy nor the heart: it feels wrong, somehow, to undertake such a personal and emotionally-charged endeavor under false pretences. I'll be interested, though, to see if the idea really takes off: I know that my existing love object and I first bonded over similar (though not identical) tastes in books, and this has proved a good indicator of complementary personalities, mutual intellectual inclinations, and compatible visions of life in the long term. If anyone tries this out for realsies, however, please keep me posted about how it goes and if you ever need a second opinion. As you already know, there's nothing I like more than an exhaustive analysis of people's bookshelves, even if they only exist in cyberspace.

Written on the Body

On Wednesday night, I was fortunate enough to attend a party held in honor of the new book The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. I have been an ardent, albeit voyeuristic, fan of the "literary tattoo" phenomenon ever since a friend tipped me off to Contrariwise, an excellent website that is devoted to them.

I would venture to say that most people (even people like me, who have a hard time remembering things like ATM pins and computer passwords and sometimes conversations completed less than ten minutes ago) carry around with them a line from a poem, or a phrase from a novel, that they will never, ever forget; a sentence or a stanza that set their synapses ablaze, ingraining itself forever in the intricate passageways of the mind.

Some of these words will leave their mark through beauty, whether it lies in their rhythm and assonance -- the way they roll off the tongue -- or the image they evoke; others remain indelible because of the deeper meaning they contain. Sometimes the association is indirect, related more to the context. A phrase, perhaps innocuous in itself, can be powerfully symbolic of an experience or a personal relationship.

However, it is a big leap to have these beloved, iconic words indelibly inscribed on your flesh. Permanently inking something onto your skin is a serious statement, and choosing to get a tattoo is a very conscious, and often deeply-pondered, decision. What spurs someone to get a line from The Satanic Verses etched into their flesh? Or, for that matter, a Charles Bukowski poem? Choices are drastically varied, as are the designs; some are straight calligraphy, whereas others incorporate illustrations.

You can while away many afternoons scrolling through the photographs on Contrariwise and also on the book's blog. Often, the featured tattoos are accompanied by an explanation from their proud wearers, each an illuminating glimpse into someone's deeply private interior life. The Word Made Flesh is also structured around this pairing of tattoo and essay, but the editors' thoughtful curation of its entries leads to bigger and broader inferences that makes the book almost anthropological in scope. It manifests a staggering breadth of human emotion and experience; it also provides incredible insight into the way we read, and the relationship that we as a society have with the written word.

For instance, some authors and quotations appear very frequently. At the event on Wednesday, the editors -- Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor -- described the process of choosing what to include in their anthology. They received many submissions inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, e.e. cummings, and Sylvia Plath; Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling are apparently also popular writers in the nation's tattoo parlors (as an observer, this trending is more apparent on the blogs because Talmadge and Taylor made a deliberate effort to avoid repetition in the book).

This leads me to what I consider to be a major issue regarding literary tattoos. Would you be pissed if you got "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" etched on your shoulderblade, only to discover on some blog that at least fifteen other people have that same tattoo? Would it tarnish the special relationship you have with Slaughterhouse Five? Or would knowing you belong to a community of Vonnegut fans somehow it enhance it?

I'm not quite sure how I would feel. People seem to have mixed reactions; some of the people in the book clearly got intricate and obscure tattoos as an expression of individuality, whereas others seem to have wanted more to signify their fandom, their inclusion in a larger reading public. As I don't have any tattoos, I can't really claim to understand what it's like to select a design, get it done, and then live with it -- you know what I mean?

However, I have been thinking about the possibility for a while. I had back surgery earlier this year, which left a vertical scar about two-and-a-half inches long on my lower back; although it's perilously close to "tramp stamp" territory, I'm intrigued by the idea of disguising, or incorporating, it somehow with a tattoo. I even know what I would get (I think), but I haven't quite yet made the plunge into certainty. It wouldn't be a text tattoo, but it certainly would be literary-related... if I get it, I promise I'll show you guys a photo!

The Luxury of Reading

Good morning to you on this rather dismal, grey New York Friday. I apologize for being in absentia for the past couple of weeks; my mother slipped on some acorns and "broke" her knee(true story!). She did quite a number on herself and actually had to have surgery, and so I've been boosting Amtrak's profit margins this quarter by zipping back and forth to be with her.

One of things she managed to do was tear her quad tendon. The way they mend it is actually quite intriguing (but not for the squeamish) -- they tie wire sutures to the torn edge of the tendon, and then drill holes in the kneecap so they can lash it tight, like a sail to a boom. Then they staple up the six-inch incision and strap you in a medieval-looking metal brace that locks the leg straight...and you can't put weight on it for six weeks while it heals. SIX WEEKS.

As of today, my mother has been under medically-enforced house arrest for a month, with at least another two weeks stretching out ahead, and she's really bored. Especially now she's cutting back on the prescription narcotics and actually awake. People come to visit, of course, but there's a lot of "down" time. So, appealing to the charitable hearts of my publishing pals, I have been sending her a lot of books.

She has been whipping through them at a voracious pace: since last Friday she has finished The Cookbook Collector and the first two Henning Mankell mysteries, and she's now knee-deep in Bill Bryson's At Home. When I was visiting her this past weekend, while watching her tick off on her fingers the other books she's read since her accident, and what she has next on her stack -- Room is first up, if you're wondering -- I realized that I was...jealous. Jealous because she actually has time to read.

If you're reading this blog, you're most likely an avid reader. But, if you are anything like me, the daily demands of life and work mean that the reading you do is in bed, in the half-hour or so before you turn off the light; it's in brief snatches of time on the subway or on the bus; perhaps, on a Sunday morning, you allow yourself a few pages before falling back asleep. I do spend a lot of time reading for work, but for me that's totally separate to "real" reading -- reading for pleasure, reading books that I've heard about or had recommended to me, books that I've eagerly anticipated. Books that I read simply because I want to, not because someone's asking me for a report.

I can barely remember the last time I spent an entire day, or even a full afternoon, just reading. All I can rely on are the visceral memories of childhood, of being utterly engrossed in a book to the exclusion of everything else. It's a completely different reading experience, a whole-body engagement that truly releases the transformative power of books. You give the words time and attention, and in return they envelop you into their world. Hours later, you return, a little dazed and confused -- a bit exhausted, even -- but exhilarated, different from the person you were when you begun.

This kind of connection just can't happen in the brief engagements we make with books in normal life. But for my mother, "normal life" has been suspended, and she has been able to rediscover what it feels like to READ: to lie with a book from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., to be so deeply embedded in it that breaking the connection to eat or go to the loo is like ripping off a Band-Aid, or clipping a blood vessel. And, as I listen to her describe how she felt while reading Great House , I know I want to feel that again, too. More often than I'd like, the pages of books go by almost in a blur because I'm exhausted and already drained; I read the words but I don't get "in it," I don't experience the holy communion that will remind me once again why nothing will ever, ever replace books.

So, here is my vow -- to make time to read. To turn off my phone and shut down my computer, to lie on the sofa and offer myself up at the altar of the book gods, hoping they'll take me.

The Future of the Book

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

IDEO, the award winning design and innovation consulting company, has come out with a video about the future of the book. The video starts with a quote that applies to both print and digital books: "Books take us to faraway places and explain the world around us." In the video they describe three versions of a tablet device that each enhance the reading experience with a social component. The three different concepts are named Nelson, Coupland, and Alice.

Nelson: "Giving readers what they need to form their own opinions on important topics of our time."

Nelson has informational layers that add context to the reading experience. The various layers allow you to see the impact the book has had on popular opinion and debate, how people talk about the subject in the media, other perspectives on the subject, and a fact checking tool.

Coupland: "Keeping you up to date with what is going on in your field."

This version allows you to see what other people are reading within your organization or network. You can access recommended reading lists and join discussions about topic or projects. If enough employees purchase a title, the book would become available in the company library. An organization's reading list can also be available to the public.

Alice "An interactive and playful reading experience that invites interaction well beyond just turning the page."

This version is my favorite. It explores how we will experience literary narratives in new ways, so that the reader becomes a participant, bluring the lines between reality and fiction. The reader will stumble upon plot twists and turns that can be unlocked by being in certain geographic locations or talking to the character in the story. The reader co-develops the story. In time, a non linear narrative emerges.

IDEO is interested in hearing feedback about their video on a facebook page they set up where they ask: What is your vision for the future of the book?

The Morning After The Night Before

A suprising number of important things happened in January, 2004: NASA landed a Mars rover, Britney Spears had her Vegas wedding annulled in less than 24 hours, the U.N. called America's bluff on the invasion of Iraq. I, however, remember that January for one thing -- the very last episode of Friends.

I freely confess to being a total Friends fiend. Moments from the show are imbedded in my brain, taking up valuable space; I often forget how to transfer calls on my phone at work, but I certainly remember the episode in which Marcel swallows a Scrabble tile (it was a K, if you're wondering). So, when grey clouds began rolling across the sky yesterday afternoon, I immediately thought of the beginning of the seventh season, when Monica and Chandler celebrate their engagement at the Plaza. Everyone is celebrating and having a great time; that is, until Monica catches Rachel hooking up with Ross. She furiously confronts them, accusing them of "stealing her thunder."

I felt a certain sympathy for Monica as I sat at my desk on the 19th floor, watching lightning bolts splinter the sky and the Twitterverse explode with furious tweets of "TORNADO!"; "OMG tornado wtf"; "Quetzalcoatl came early!" Seriously, a tornado on the night of much-anticipated [tk] reviews event? We had cake! We had raffle prizes! We had homemade guacamole! But, with this kind of weather, who would turn up? Damn mother nature, up in here stealing all our thunder!

The subway ride was rather morose, as we cradled the cake and contemplated a damp evening alone together, stuffing ourselves with cupcakes and making up silly imaginary names to enter into the raffle. (Mike Ock, anyone?) However, as soon as we got off the subway in Brooklyn we ran into some colleagues, intrepidly rubber-booted, and a thin ray of sunshine began to show itself over the horizon.

This is all a long way of saying that, despite the Doppler Radar-registering chaos , we had a fantastic evening and a terrific turn out. The High Dive folks were wonderful, and we took over the back with our tables of food and [tk] reviews paraphernalia. Claire made beautiful cupcakes, Jess brought delicious flat-bread pizza, Carmen baked fresh chocolate chip cookies, and Joey mashed up a wicked guacamole. Nearly everyone entered the free raffle for two prizes: we gave away a "wild card" bundle of funny and crazy books, as well as a grand prize stack of every book reviewed in Issue V! We also got to wish ourselves a happy quinquennial by blowing out the candles on Caroline's amazing cake.

We're so grateful to all the people who came, hell or high-water. Friends, colleagues, significant others: we couldn't do this without you. As NPR recently pointed out, word-of-mouth is still the most effective way to sell books -- and the best way to let everybody know about start-up online book review websites. Thank you so much for your support, and for sharing our site with the people you know. We can't wait to throw another party and have an equally fantastic evening. There are rumors of literary trivia in the air...but we'll keep you posted.

New York Publishing Social Diary

I write today in quite a depressed state, because it's after Labor Day and our summer hours are officially over. My brain is conditioned to shut down at 1 p.m. on Fridays, and it's now 3:22 and reserves are draining...so I'm trying to distract myself by thinking of all the wonderful events that are scheduled for this weekend and next week. Thanks to Jess, we already know that it's the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, which is quite a highlight of the publishing year. There are events all day on Sunday, so check out their website to see when you can catch people like the Pauls (Krugman and Auster), John Ashbery, Lan Samantha Chang, Rosanne Cash, Mark Doty, Jennifer Egan , Naomi Klein, Mary Gaitskill, David Rakoff, and Gary Shteyngart (to name but just a few). And even if you don't go to an event, you can still peruse the offerings of numerous indie bookstores and presses, as well as publications, who all set up shop in Columbus Park.

There are several events tonight and tomorrow to kick off the festival, some of which Jess did mention yesterday. But, to recap:

FRIDAY

• The Brooklyn Indie Party at Greenlight Bookstore. It's a celebration of independent presses in Brooklyn, with everyone from Akashic to Archipegalo to Tin House to BOMB. Enjoy some free drinks and spinning by a variety of DJs while admiring the amazing creativity of this southern borough. (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland Ave. 7:30 p.m.)

• Literary Pub Contest run by PEN America. A literary quiz night run by an admirable and worthy organization (which holds its own festival every year in the spring). There will be authors competing with you, and PEN will provide everything you need. Just bring your your (literal) book smarts and prepare for a knock-out fight. (St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water St., 7–10 p.m.)

SATURDAY

• Litquake, New York's Third Annual Lit Crawl. Modeled on San Francisco's famous lit crawl, this is a citywide celebration. Three different phases of partying throughout the evening promise a night of enjoyable mayhem. Head to landmarks like KGB for Harper Perennial's literary trivia contest, or the White Slab Palace to see NBCC reviewers acknowledge their harsh words and grovel for forgiveness. It all ends up with a Paris Review-hosted bash and an afterparty at Fontana's on Eldridge Street. DOES IT GET ANY HIPPER THAN THIS? (Check the website, http://litcrawl.org/, for a complete schedule and locations for different events)

• Genre Busters at Freebird Books. This Brooklyn institution is hosting a revue show with artists and authors who work in a genre to turn it on its head. There will be tons of readings and performances, Q&A, trivia, and food! (Freebird Books & Goods, 123 Columbia St., 8 p.m)

On Sunday you can nurse your hangover at the festival...my head hurts already. Look for us, as we'll be passing out special [tk] reviews bookmark invitations to the best party of all - our very own bash on Thursday, September 16th, at High Dive in Park Slope! (I gotta promote it again because it's going to be JUST THAT AMAZING):

Quinquennial Mayhem (a celebration of Issue V)!

September is a magical month. The first crispness of autumn descends; we get a three-day weekend; and the world is full of children, with their innocent shining faces, galloping happily back to school. This year, however, we love September for another reason: it brings with it the FIFTH ISSUE of [tk] reviews!

To that end, please join us to celebrate our small but mighty milestone at Park Slope's High Dive bar on Thursday, September 16th . For those who speak the password – [tk] reviews – there will be $2 High Life drafts, $3 Yuengling drafts, and a dollar off all other drinksfrom 7 to 10 p.m. We’ll have reserved tables, and the more culinarily adept among us will be bringing food.

SEE YOU THERE!

Everything Has Its Price

Slate.com is one of my favorite websites to browse when underoccupied, and given how quiet it’s been here lately I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on the site. One of my favorite things yesterday was a blog post about a close reading of Cat Fancy magazine. Which is a real magazine. It got me thinking about doing a close reading of my own – but what magazine? I rummaged around my desk until I alighted upon a copy of Publishers Weekly, our industry’s cornerstone publication.


What simultaneously amuses and irritates me about PW is the magazine’s practice of allowing different entities to sponsor its cover. Not a tear-off sheet, but the actual cover. This week, honors were obviously bought by the Church of Scientology, as the cover features the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest as announced by a banner and also an apocalyptic graphic of a flaming quill set against a galaxy of stars. It’s a glossy, fancy fold-out design, with an inside panel celebrating Hubbard the writer (not Hubbard the mad man, sadly) that unfolds to a double-spread celebrating some previous winners. I wonder how much this cost them? (They also bought the back cover, too)

Next comes the table of contents, which I never really look at because PW has a pretty predictable structure. We jump past the audio ad to the following page and BAM! It’s Google. I’m so sick of Google. They have an article about Google every week. This week’s anxiety attack is about the Google/Verizon settlement (purported existence of), and what this means for the Google Book Settlement. The answer is: we’re fucked regardless.

Underneath the Google hysteria page are the first items in the “News Briefs” sections: People, Places, and Things. Molly Stern has moved to Crown after resolving a contract dispute with Penguin – apparently 375 Hudson Street wouldn’t release her as she had eight months left there per her employment agreement, so she stopped coming into the office. It’s an interesting move because Stern primarily edits fiction, a genre that Crown doesn’t really publish. Obviously there’s an aesthetic shift for them on the horizon, so keep your eyes peeled: a new imprint or an acquisition spree? Agents, make your lunch dates! There’s also more dirty business going on in the Barnes & Noble ownership struggle (what else is new?), and some scandal about a teen lit festival in Texas. Apparently censorship is alive and well in the Lone Star State, which (sadly) is hardly suprising.

However, even more disturbing than this is the letter from the president of PW announcing PW Select, a new quarterly publication for self-published authors. I have many issues with self-publishing, the primary one being that, unless they are very careful and thorough, people often get massively ripped off. And now here’s PW, a venerated publication, joining in the merciless free-for-all! For a simple “processing fee” (just like an infomercial) of $149 -- $149!!!! – self-published authors can have their books listed in this supplement. PW will review 25 of them: “we briefly considered charging for reviews,” says president George W. Slowik, Jr., “but in the end preferred to maintain our right to review what we deemed worthy.” Thank god they maintained some integrity. But only a little, as they are marketing this thing as a legitimate publication when it is really just a glorified advertising circular, the kind that supermarkets sometimes stuff into the Sunday New York Times.

This “circular” format is apparently how PW got started way back in 1872, but the magazine definitely does not present itself as such now; as a major review format, it cultivates a reputation for independent criticism and journalism that is unaffiliated with any particular publisher or author. By naming their new circular PW Select they are clearly abusing this reputation, using it to confer a false sense of legitimacy and integrity upon a wholly commercial product. Essentially, they are sullying their name for the sake of conning people out of $150 a pop, and I think it’s a big and disturbing mistake. If you want to read more, check out this GalleyCat post.

Now I’m actually quite angry. So angry, in fact, that I kind of don’t want to read PW anymore. This is too much. People already criticize legitimate publishers for putting profit above aesthetic integrity; how is this going to help counter that ill-founded reputation? URGH. I'm off to find something less ennervating to read.

A Quaint, Midafternoon Panic Attack

After Jess’s heartfelt post yesterday, which is simultaneously depressing and inspiring – not to mention well-written and absolutely on point – I feel the need to lighten the mood a bit here in the land of [tk]. So I am going to share with you my current internet obsession: http://betterbooktitles.com/

It’s a potent formula for humor: ostensibly, the site’s concept reflects and caters to the lowest common cultural denominator, but its humor doesn’t fully translate unless one actually possesses an extensive knowledge of the literary canon. The Reduced Shakespeare Company relies on exactly the same equation, the same self-reflexive sort of hilarity that mocks intellectualism by relying upon it.

The success of this depends on what I have come to call, rather pretentiously, “the arc of literary development.” English majors probably embody this most concretely because they receive a formal, collegiate induction into the world of literature. Texts are treated reverently and dissected thoroughly; new depths of meaning are plumbed as undergraduates get used to their instruments of theory. There is an exhilarating sensation of power as students realize that they can distill insight and meaning from almost anything.

But then, somewhere along the way, the bubble pops: the novelty abates, and though the principles and concepts remain and are respected, the constant anticipation of discovering something mind-blowingly new no longer dominates. Intellectual voraciousness is now tempered by cynicism and world-weary experience, an acknowledgment that almost everything ever created by humanity is in some way inspired by just three main motivations and preoccupations of the human consciousness: sex, God, and death.

Stripping down the canon like this is perversely pleasurable. Yes, writing can be beautiful and breath-taking and transportive, but underneath its dazzling trappings lie recycled dilemmas that are can be absurd in their predictability. When boiled down to their core, the books to which we attach such great cultural import often reveal themselves to be bizarrely base and trivial.

This might seem an awful, or even heretical, position for someone who works in publishing to hold. Maybe it is. But if I’m honest with myself, it’s partly a mechanism of denial for me, an effort to compensate for the loss of my literary innocence. On one level I laugh at McSweeney’s “Ten Reasons We’re Not Going To Grad School,” but on another I desperately yearn to once again feel that intellectual invincibility, that feeling that the meaning of the world and life can be mine for the taking.

And now look. We’re all depressed again. So go back to that website and laugh yourself up a storm before cracking open a copy of One Long Sentence About Handjobs. At least this time around, you won't have to write any papers when you've finished it.

Dispatch from the ASA Book Exhibit

In academia, each area of study holds an annual conference that is identified by an acronmyn—AHA (the American Historical Association), MLA (the Modern Language Association), APSA (the American Political Science Association) and AAS (the Association for Asian Studies) to name a few. Professors come to these conferences to give papers, interview for jobs, and attend sessions on a variety of predetermined scholarly topics. Publishers attend conferences to display books in the conference hall book exhibit, in the hopes that professors will adopt the books as required reading in classes (and therefore encourage students to buy the books themselves).

This weekend, I'm attending ASA, the American Sociological Association Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. When I arrived, I unpacked the twenty boxes of books I shipped to the conference hall in order to set up my booth by category—African-American, Cultural Sociology, Asian/Pacific, Education, Race, Criminal Justice, Economics, Medical Ethics, Psychology, Religion, Women's Studies, Sexuality, and Urban Sociology. I hung posters, set up displays, and put out catalogs.

In the morning, the conference hall opens strictly at 9:00am. Professors wait outside while conference organizers only allow exhibitors to enter the conference hall, and when the hall opens, the professors dramatically rush in, visiting their favorite publishers first. Traffic slows during morning sessions, but picks up again in the afternoons when there are wine and cheese receptions and author signings.

Conferences are a great place to meet professors and it's fun to help them find appropriate books for their classes. Academics are usually interesting and quirky, and I always end up learning something from our discussions. I also meet quite a few characters, including this sociology professor below who is demonstrating two of the highlights of working the book exhibit at at academic conference: interesting facial hair and free wine.

Do Books Go To Heaven?

I usually read the Sunday New York Times with a lazy eye, dissecting the weddings and skimming the "Week in Review" before finally ending up at the Magazine. Sometimes the feature stories catch my attention, but this past week I was more intrigued by one of the magazine’s regular columns, Rob Walker's CONSUMED. His topic? Now that e-book sales are rising, and electronic readers are increasingly prevalent, we’re facing a culture in which the physical book , in its traditional context, might become obsolete. However, he says, don’t cart them to the dumpster just yet – there are many possibilities for reincarnation in other areas of life.

For me, this is a disturbing thesis, not least because I work in publishing and saying the word "e-book" is akin to uttering "Macbeth" in front of a troop of actors at rehearsal. As I've discussed on this blog before, I am very attached to my books; as tangible objects they are beautiful in their own way, but they also hold a deeper significance. Arranged on my shelves, they are anchors of memory, testaments to knowledge, milestones of my life. And so Rob Walker’s edict --"set aside any emotional attachment you may feel toward the reading of physical books; the truth is that creative uses for books that do not involve engaging with words on a page already abound" -- is deeply jarring.

However, I know that people’s feelings towards books qua books vary. In his article, Walker references Nicholson Baker’s New Yorker essay about books as physical objects (highly recommended reading), which traces their role as socio-cultural signifiers: “aspirational” people have been ordering books by the foot for centuries in order to fill their library shelves, so it’s not that much of a surprise that stacks of older books are sold as decorating accessories, their value based on what’s outside rather than in.

Though I don't agree with Walker's pronouncement that we're in a "post-book" culture (i.e., that attachment of any kind to physical books is démodé) I do think it is important to draw a distinction between the use of books as “props” – to reinforce an image – and the repurposing of them to perform some other function. Buying old books on eBay by the stack to enhance a décor theme, to impart a fabricated air of lived-in intellectualism, is not the same as taking one with a particularly beautiful cover, or with a title of specific significance, and repurposing it as a bag.

Perhaps this is an irrational view for me to hold, but I feel the latter is a more genuine and respectful afterlife; the book is being appreciated in and of itself as a physical object, and its symbolic representation is a reflection of its owner’s values. It is a celebration of books and what they add to our existence; carrying a book clutch suggests that you are a book lover who wants to outwardly manifest your interest. On the other hand, occupying the bookcases in your new sitting room with bundles of color-cordinated books you bought on Etsy is not quite the same. It sullies them by demanding their complicity in a falsehood; rather than celebrating them, it is using them as a means to achieve your own aggrandizement.

Having said this, I would still feel uncomfortable taking a hacksaw to a book in pursuit of a purse, or a bonsai planter, or a lamp, or one of the many other things people are making out of books these days. I must confess, though, that I am tempted to take a big stack and punch an awl through them all every time I go into McNally-Jackson and see the ceiling in their cafe. Wouldn't that just be awesome to have in your bedroom?

P.S. HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13th!

Synergizing the Backward Overflow...

I don’t know about you, but I spent Wednesday evening lying on my sofa, stuffing my face and indulging in a television mini-marathon. Admitting this on a book blog may appear to be the ultimate act of blasphemy, but redemption presented itself towards the end of the night in a most unlikely form: ladies and gentleman, I give you Work of Art's third episode, "Judging A Book By Its Cover."

Work of Art is Bravo’s new Project Runway-esque show that features aspiring artists. As in PR, they face a series of challenges that demand results under pressure. Each week, a panel of judges evaluates the contestants’ work, selecting a winner – and one poor soul who has to pack up their brushes and go home.

In a quantum leap from last week’s “task” – to create a work of art out of trash – Wednesday’s gauntlet was laid by none other than Kathryn Court, the venerated publisher of Penguin. The assignment? Create a new cover for one of six Penguin Classics titles: Frankenstein, The Time Machine, Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The prize? Their art on the jacket of a special edition of the book, to be published by Penguin.

Watching television collide with literature made me apprehensive, and to a certain extent that anxiety was not unfounded. Most of the artists seemed not to have ever read the titles they were assigned. One woman, when confronted with Pride and Prejudice, said after a pause, “well, I’ve seen the movie.” (She also spelled Austen with an “i”). Only one contestant, Miles, actually bothered to investigate the text in question; after timing how long it took him to read a page of Frankenstein, he figured out he could finish the whole thing in four hours and so sequestered himself in a closet to do just that.

Miles's preparation showed, as his was one of the few projects that actually demonstrated an understanding of the task. It was strongly related to the book, and although I see why the judges thought it would not work terribly well as a cover, I thought Miles “got it” – he realized that the challenge was to synergize art and literature, to allow two different aesthetic mediums to work in concert and support/strengthen each other. This symbiosis was even more clearly manifested in the winner’s work: his piece was bold and cohesive, and I agree that it will translate well from the gallery to the bookstore.

There is also another synergy at work here: that between the publishing and television industries. What were Penguin’s motives for appearing on Work of Art? Product placement is one thing, but participating ("endorsing") a reality show is a much bigger leap. I'm also intrigued by the fact that there were no Penguin representatives on the judging panel.

Pondering this reminded of an article that appeared a couple of days ago in The New York Times about Elle magazine’s history of collaboration with television, which actually began with Project Runway; one of the show’s judges, Nina Garcia, used to be the publication’s Fashion Director. “Elle has certainly met its fair share of criticism for welcoming the crude medium of reality television into an orbit occupied by Anna Wintour and Giorgio Armani,” it states, which certainly is applicable here; I’m sure plenty of people will be judging Penguin for affiliating itself so firmly with television like this. But, as the editor of Elle Robbie Myers explains, “ 'I thought it was a good idea for us to do Project Runway. That was not necessarily the popular view around here. But my feeling was that we should be in as many mediums as we could be as a brand when appropriate,” she said. “We want exposure.” ’

Myers's forthrightness is producing results; Elle's sales figures are benefiting from these multi-media collaborations. In a shrinking market, is it wrong for publishers to adopt the same approach? Though many may mutter about the integrity of literature, Penguin leaping into bed with Bravo is just the latest in a series of acts demonstrating increasing intimacy between publishers and more "modern" media. Take book "trailers," for instance, or the promise of a publishing-related TV show debuting in the fall.

My argument for synergy, though, is not just financial (although every little helps). It speaks more to the fact that reading has been pushed to the fringes of mainstream culture -- a statement clearly supported by much of the Work of Art episode. If collaboration gets more people to take another look at books and the experience of reading, then I'm all for it; perhaps then everyone will at some point have the desire to read Dracula instead of just watching the film, or remember how to spell Jane Austen. To borrow a phrase from Derek Bok: "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

Giveaway: Secondhand Bookshelf

It’s Friday, which means this is my last blog post for the week. To celebrate, I’m going to launch a little contest I’ll be calling Secondhand Bookshelf. Here’s the basic idea: I go to Book Culture and purchase an exciting used book. It will, most likely, be a little beaten-up, but that’s part of the fun. Maybe there will be interesting marginalia, or it will be on a dusty and dated subject, or it will feature strange and fantastic illustrations.

And it will be a book that someone no longer wanted. It will likely be, in Herman Melville’s words, “the book in the old morocco cover; the book with the cocked-hat corners; the book full of fine old family associations; the book with seventeen plates, executed in the highest style of art; [a] precious book [that] was next to useless.”

So, moving on! In keeping with the theme of my review of Lighting Out for the Territory, the precious but useless book I have for you this week is Sobriquets and Nicknames, by Albert R. Frey, published by Houghton Mifflin.



It once belonged to the Union High School (of Mansfield, Washington) library!



It was written by the author of William Shakespeare and Alleged Spanish Prototypes, A Bibliography of Junius, and A Bibliography of Playing Cards!





It was published in 1887! (Probably!)



You can find all sorts of interesting nicknames within! For example, did you know that Victor Hugo called Voltaire the Ape of Genius?



Or that Governor Enos T. Throop of New York was known as Small-Light Throop?



Or, on a related note, that William Thomas Fitzgerald was dubbed the Small-Beer Poet?



Plus, this book comes with a neat note that I found tucked inside! Thanks, Patty! I’m glad to hear that Junior is STILL KICKING.



To be entered in the (what will inevitably be very small) drawing, send your name—and the Twainian sobriquet you’d go by if you were an author—to my attention at jmcgarvey.tk at gmail dot com by noon next Friday, May 28, and I’ll ask Caroline to announce the winner here. There are no restrictions on who can enter—except, of course, the seven [tk] ladies. I might post all of the sobriquets I receive, so know that when you send them in, and make 'em snappy!

Good luck!

Musings on (What's Been) Lost

Maybe that subject will drive some traffic this way!

A few weeks ago, when I was starting to think about my week of blogging, I had very definite plans for today. I had hoped to live-blog this conference, the first hosted by C19, a new society for nineteenth-century Americanist scholars. Some people whose work I really admire will be speaking today, including Patricia Crain (author of The Story of A, which I read as an undergraduate), Samuel Otter (whose new book, Philadelphia Stories, I’ll be reviewing for July), and Brenda Wineapple (who wrote White Heat, a very good book about Emily Dickinson, and a biography of Hawthorne that I hear is also a fine read). Not to mention a host of other scholars and writers over the course of the weekend—again including, but not limited to, Thomas Augst, John Bryant, John Stauffer, Wyn Kelley, Wai Chee Dimock, Meredith McGill, Hester Blum, Laura Wexler, and Bryan Waterman (that’s in chronological order). Suffice it to say that it sounds like a very fun conference, and I’d love to be there.

Unfortunately, because I’m not from the East Coast, I didn’t realize that Penn State—which is hosting the conference—isn’t in Philadelphia. I had planned to make at least a day trip, but on Tuesday night I found out that the school is actually in central Pennsylvania, a five-hour drive from New York. So this post will not in fact be a live-blogged literary conference, but that is a theme I plan to return to in the future. Be on the lookout in coming months for a post about another, probably less exciting conference.

Luckily, I still have something to write about on what I’m deciding to call Academic Thursdays. (All right, it will probably just be this one Academic Thursday.) This morning on the train I read Lawrence Biemiller’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Should Your New Buildings Look Old?” In it, he discusses the phenomenon of univerities commissioning buildings in the predominant campus style. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t, as at the University of Virginia: “a 366,000-square-foot basketball arena with a 1,500-space parking garage has no business whatsoever pretending to look like Monticello.”

I responded to the article because I, while not trained in architecture, love the unique place-ness of university campuses. I’m always alert to their differences when I visit. And some of those differences aren’t architectural, as Biemiller notes: “What is it about the design of my campus that I like? It might be the architecture of the buildings, but chances are that it's actually something that's harder to put a finger on—the interplay of buildings, trees, open spaces, views, and other elements . . . On the best campuses, the specific architectural vocabulary is often secondary—what matters is how the elements come together.” When I visited the University of Mississippi two years ago, I discovered in wandering the campus a confederate cemetery. Stanford boasts a mausoleum, home to Leland Stanford, Jr., and his family, and in the middle of some of the Main Quad's Richardsonian arches are little hearts. Both of those campuses are large and spread out; Columbia, in contrast, feels like the singularity at the moment of the Big Bang. All the materials of any Ivy League campus are there—the library, the various neoclassical buildings—but there’s so much less space between them. These are the elements, and they’re the strange things that make any campus stand out.

You can see one of the Stanford hearts on the third column from the left:



Ultimately, Biemiller argues against maintaining—or attempting to maintain—one architectural aesthetic on a university campus. It’s intellectually dishonest, he writes, when one architect is asked to reproduce not merely a style but the work of one other, specific architect or group of architects. (At, for example, Yale, with its elaborate and extravagant residential colleges designed by James Gamble Rogers.) It’s expensive. (Those buildings at Yale cost $2 million to build in the 1920s, Biemiller reports, and in 2007 Princeton paid $136 million to build a Collegiate Gothic residential college.) And it fails to keep the buildings in dialogue with one another, something at which Bowdoin College has apparently been very successful.

You might ask what all this has to do with books. Well, I’ve been thinking about tradition and design in publishing as well. Yesterday I attended a memorial service for Nina Bourne, a much-admired and long-established (she worked in publishing for seventy years) copywriter and advertiser, first at Simon & Schuster and then at Knopf. At the door we were given folders that contained a survey of Nina’s finest ad work, including pieces from the campaigns for Eloise and Catch-22. They were breathtaking. They were funny, they were sharp, they were irreverent—but best of all, they were just so full of text. In Nina’s time at Knopf, she perfected a style that The New York Times characterized thus: “large, clean, heavily bordered ads in black and white, with minimal copy used to create maximum impact.” Knopf still uses that style. It’s effective, it’s straightforward, and it’s smart. But I was filled with some longing. There was a real writerly flair in these ads. You could see Nina flexing her muscle behind them, and you could see wit.

Nina's ad for Catch-22:



To create such an ad now might reflect Biemiller’s argument about intellectual honesty and maintaining a contemporary aesthetic. Does anyone today want to read an ad that is mostly text, one that forms its own story and its own narrative? Would it look hopelessly dated, as much so as that UVA basketball arena, next to the minimalist, sparser ads that you find in papers today? Would it fail to read on its own terms, for its own virtues, instead seeming as much like a move of nostalgia as, say, publishing a book now with a jacket like this one?



(This might interest, by the way: comic books as mid-century paperbacks.)

Our company’s lobby is lined with such books as the above, and again, every time I see them, I’m filled with a wistfulness. There are many, many beautiful jackets designed every year, of course. But there’s something about the stark graphics, the purposeful lettering, and the more roughly hewn paper on jackets like the above that speaks to me. And I’m not sure it’s something we could return to, or really dabble in, today.

In his article, Biemiller warns against hewing too closely to an outdated aesthetic, and against the rigidity it brings with it. But the question I’d like to leave you with is the opposite: what if dedication to a contemporary aesthetic has brought with it an equal amount of rigidity? How do you reclaim what’s been lost?

Concord of Interest

It’s now my week to blog. I’m going to begin by discussing one of the basic tenets of this website, well-established among us reviewers, but not yet explicitly stated here. Namely, I’m going to talk about conflict of interest, and what it’s like to produce a site of book reviews when you work in publishing.

I think I speak for all of us at [tk] when I say that we love our jobs, we love books, and that working with the printed (and digital) word is an essential part of our lives. But an attachment to the literary can also make working in publishing genuinely draining. We here at [tk] spend our days in publicity, editorial, managing editorial, and academic marketing, but we spend our nights and our weekends attempting to maintain other identities. We’re fiction writers, critics, bloggers, and budding journalists who also often work late, and who always have a manuscript or a proposal tucked under our arms. We’re people who love words so much that our jobs—jobs that allow us to do some of the things we enjoy most—aren’t quite enough of an outlet. We need creative expression for that passion too.

And as I say above, maintaining these two identities as publisher and creator can be difficult. Maybe that’s why you see considerable turnover among assistants in publishing. Maybe they decide that other identity—the writer, the scholar—is their true, central one. But I’ve found that sustaining my creative self is difficult for another, more pragmatic reason: conflict of interest.

Working in editorial has given me an entirely new perspective on books, an invaluable one. Maybe books have lost a little of their mystery, a little of their miraculousness—but they’re so much richer now that I’m aware of how many people and conversations lie behind each one. And being one of those people has been great. But I’m not finished relating to books in another way. Three years after graduating from college, I’m not done thinking and learning about literature critically, and I’m not done writing about it in that context either. There are few outlets for me, however. I’m fortunate enough to work for a company that reimburses its employees for tuition, and in my time here I’ve been able to return to the classroom. I’ve written a couple of papers, presented at a few small conferences. I’ve kept my hand in the game. But reviews seem like the best way of producing critical writing frequently and consistently, and conflict of interest—due to my job—has prevented me from reviewing for the few publications at which I’ve inquired.

That was my personal reason for wanting this website to exist, and I think my fellow reviewers had similar compulsions. And it meant that when we first discussed the possibility of [tk] reviews, we were keenly aware of conflict of interest. We decided at that first meeting that we would review only books not published by our house—not just our imprint, but by our entire company. It was a decision that caused some agony. What, some asked, about our imprint’s books, books that we very much want to succeed? And our house is large—wouldn’t avoiding their books drastically limit what we could review?

Well, yes, I respond to the latter question. This policy does limit what we can review. But thanks to other large trade publishers, the academic presses, and the many fantastic small independent presses, no one can say there aren’t enough books available. And in fact, this policy has proven a luxury and a boon. In our first month we were able to review several books that perhaps wouldn’t get as much press coverage as those published by other, larger companies—and in upcoming months, we’ll also be reviewing books that might not be reviewed outside academic journals. Because we’re each writing only one review a month, we also have the luxury of choosing longer books, or books that are more difficult to find, or books whose rewards require a little more digging.

And, we decided, although we felt that we shouldn’t review our imprint’s books, this blog might be an appropriate venue to mention them in the future. Because we here at [tk] are genuinely excited about the books we publish. We want to share them with you—we want you to know about events, we want you to eagerly anticipate what we’ve been working on for months or even years.

Ultimately, though, the website is [tk] reviews: it’s the reviews that are our focus. And I think that by reviewing—whether our own books or not—we can do only good. If we positively review a book and someone buys it, it’s not a win for that publisher—whether Penguin or Oxford University Press or Archipelago—and a loss for us. Even as large houses struggle and small ones vanish, book publishing can’t afford to be a zero-sum game. A book bought rewards everyone—because hopefully behind that book lies a happy reader, a new ally to every publisher, who will return repeatedly to the bookstore.

As an editorial assistant by day and a critic by night, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to write for [tk]—to know that my creative work might do some good for my industry. We’ll write the reviews, you buy the books, and maybe, together, we’ll save publishing.

Diary of A Dream-Crusher

Sorry for the interregnum, folks -- yesterday was a brief trip to publishing hell. The only (very welcome!) respite was a Bouchon Bakery expedition to celebrate the birthday of another [tk]er, Jess Freeman-Slade. But apart from that delicious hour, this pretty much sums up how I felt:





I was in an especially foul mood because, along with everything else, I had three rejection letters on my "to-do" list. Along with photocopying and formatting manuscripts, this is an aspect of my job that I really, really dislike.

It took me almost an hour to write my first rejection letter to an author. I was an intern, and my supervisor came into my office, dropped a proposal down onto my desk, and said "I want you to read this. And if you don't like it, I want you to draft a rejection."

In retrospect, I can't believe I agonized so long over it. It was an unsolicited proposal from a someone who wanted to write an annotated Little Women; if I remember correctly, her entire pitch was predicated on the fact that she'd developed a successful side gig as an educational Jo March impersonator. But although the entire thing was achingly amateurish, the effort she'd devoted to the materials was palpable. This project was the culmination of a lifetime's devotion, and in one paragraph I was going to tell her that it simply wasn't good enough.

I remember going over and over the wording, flipping back through the proposal and my report, wondering if I was making the right decision. On one level I knew I was -- there was no question -- but I still could not wrap my head around the fact that I had the ability to so drastically affect someone's life. Like everyone else, I've experienced rejection before, and I know what it feels like. You can rationalize a "no" as much as you want, in love or in life or somewhere in between, and tell yourself that it's not personal/just not the right match/them and not you -- but it still really, really sucks. And unless you're Eckhart freaking Tolle, you carry it around with you for a while. It's not easy to move on from that.

Someone once told me that writing rejection letters gets easier with practice, and to a certain extent they were right. With each one I've become more adept at delivering the sentiment, at tempering my "no" with the right amount of praise. As I learn more and more about how much time and money and effort are devoted to each book we publish, it becomes a less emotional and more economic decision -- sometimes the sides of the cost vs. gain equation don't balance, however much you wish they would. And I'm slowly understanding that my taste does not always reflect commercial appeal: declining a plainly sell-able proposal from a "hot shot" agent no longer disturbs me so much because I know it's going to end up somewhere. If anything, the quandary there is acknowledging that the very nature of the game means you will often end up passing on something that turns out to be a runaway success. Every editor has a few of those stories, but every good editor will counter them with what I call Miracles on Ice -- occasions on which they took a risk that risk paid off against all the odds.

However, signing the letter or pressing the e-mail SEND button still makes me feel like a shit. I wonder how the author will feel, if mine is the first or the seventh rejection, if it will be the final defeat that makes them put down their pen. Even the worst submissions, the unsolicited ones that clearly come from a not-quite-rational mind -- the Florence Foster Jenkinses of the literary world -- convey a touching hope, misguided as it may be. Unless these people are made of Teflon, it's got to hurt.

To ameliorate this rather depressing conclusion, here are two somewhat positive things that I've learned from my crash-course in rejection. Though obviously this isn't always the case, the first is that "no" can often be fairly arbitrary. An editor might think a manuscript or proposal is really, really good, but they have to say no because it's about dogs and there are already three dog books coming up in the next 18 months. It might be because a recently published title about dogs absolutely tanked, and other departments like sales and publicity are reluctant to go back out there so soon with a book on the same subject. You know that excuse you heard about why X University rejected you -- that they already had a surfeit of oboists from Florida and so they couldn't justify admitting another when they desperately needed Midwestern tuba players? There's actually some truth in there.

The second is that whatever you do, you need to do it first and foremost for yourself. If you enjoy the experience of writing, not just the end product, then you can still salvage some happiness from the ruins of rejection. Think of Florence Foster Jenkins -- at least, I always do. She may have sung like a bat on helium, but she had a hell of a good time shattering the windows in Carnegie Hall. Life's just too short to do it any other way.

Bettering The World, One Book At A Time

Admitting this probably qualifies me as a borderline candidate for that A & E show Hoarders, but whatever: I hate to part with my books. Someone once joked that I think of my books as children -- and they were right. When I moved into my first apartment here I bought an IKEA bookshelf and, despite my Bryn Mawr degree, failed to assemble it correctly; it slowly devolved from a rectangle into a parallelogram until, on one hot May night, it imploded with a resounding crash. As I ran around picking up books from the floor I felt like I'd stumbled upon the scene of a school bus accident. It was traumatizing.

There's something reassuring about the physical presence of books, perhaps because they remind me of the houses I grew up in. Overflowing shelves were (and still are the norm) at home, and as a little kid I remember feeling anxious when I went to places without any books. Hardcovers especially are soothing in their solidity, and there's something very special about the visual and tactile convergence that occurs when you're confronted with a truly beautiful book jacket.

I think I also like to hold onto books because, in my warped mind, they serve as a tangible chronology of my intellectual and aesthetic development -- each is strongly connected to a different period of my life. When I hold my tattered copy of Middlesex I can instantly remember how blown away I was while reading it, so much so that I started it in the airport lounge at Dulles and had finished it by the time I landed in Cairo 16 hours later. There are books I read in high school and college, full of scribblings in the margins that were intelligible then but now look like squashed insects; books my mother read and loved, and then passed on to me; books I've had the privilege of working on so far in my editorial "career".

However, there's a point at which a book collection can become confining rather than defining. I'm not yet a warped little Gollum, crooning away away in my tiny cave while stroking the spines one by one, but in the spirit of spring cleaning I do acknowledge that a careful culling is in order. I've previously equivocated about this because I'm never sure what to do with my jettisoned titles. I can't bring myself to cart them off to the Strand: it would feel like I was selling my children into slavery. And I can't bear to leave them on the curb, abandoned to the whims of passers-by and the weather.

All hesitation disappeared, though, when I received an e-mail from my wondrous fellow blogatrice, Claire Kelley. She wanted to get the word out about a "book drive" event this coming Saturday for Books Through Bars, a non-profit organization that works to furnish prisons with books. I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of this project, but spending a few minutes on their website was inspiring. As a lowly publishing worker bee, my wallet is woefully thin -- I certainly can't give financial help to worthy organizations as freely as I'd like. But I can give books. Lots and lots and lots. Details about the event, which is being held at Brooklyn's Freebird Books, are at the end of the post. Several of us are planning to attend, and we'll probably be writing about it next week.

Knowing that my books will be "paying it forward" in the world makes parting with them much, much easier. If you too feel burdened by your bookshelves and/or are inspired by the warm winds of spring to have a massive clear-out, I really urge you to read below about this event -- or, if you can't attend, research another way in which you can help your book change someone else's life.


BBQ and Book drive for Books Through Bars / Saturday, May 8, 2-6 pm
“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”
--Mark Twain

Just a reminder that if you have leftover books and are looking to make space in your cramped apartment, we are leading a book drive on May 8 for the grassroots organization, Books Through Bars, a non-profit which donates books to prisoners across the country.

So in the spirit of spring cleaning (you know those walls are closing in on you) and Mark Twain, whose passing 100 years ago we also note, we will make our backyard a book drop and party space for the occasion. BBQ and beer will be on hand, not to mention Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer T-shirts special for the occasion (from our friends at Novel-T). All Freebird’s proceeds from the sale of the t-shirts will go to Books Through Bars.

ooks donated to BTB are tax deductible. Books Through Bars is especially looking for books in the following categories -- and preferably in paperback, to cut down on postage costs:

African-American history, especially 20th century
Native American history
Latin American history
Radical politics
Social sciences and psychology
Dictionaries, thesauruses, and Spanish-English dictionaries
Learning world languages
How-to (drawing, chess, sign language...)
Mayan and Aztec history
Memoirs and fiction by people of color
Mythology
Poetry anthologies

That said, we don’t want to turn away any generous offers and what BTB can’t use will either make its way into Freebird’s general population or off to another charitable organization.
Freebird Books: 123 Columbia Street (between Kane and Degraw streets)Brooklyn, NY 11231718-643-8484http://www.freebirdbooks.com/directions.htmlNew hours: Sat-Sun 11 am-10 pm (def); Thurs-Fri 6 to 10 pm (mostly); the rest of the week (by chance)