Publishing Insider

how to say Chabon and Dubus

From Marilyn Dahl of Shelf Awareness, a wonderful site listing pronunciations of famous folk!

Mike Perry, trucks, love and book groups

Book Sense Summer Reading Picks

From HarperPerennial:

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE
MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD, Debra Dean

ABUNDANCE, Sena Jeter Naslund
THE SPACE BETWEEN US, Thrity Umrigar

TRUCK: A Love Story, Michael Perry

And speaking of TRUCK, here’s a special note from one of the nicest guys ever, Mike Perry:

“Howdy, book club folks.  Thank you for inviting me to attend your meeting.  I shall try to conduct myself appropriately.  Lately I have been raising pigs and chickens and will therefore leave my boots at the door.  This is a relatively new habit developed on the advice of my wife.  I cannot lie – I am lazy about unlacing, and sometimes when she travels I get pertinacious and track up the kitchen.  I watch the clock and calendar and mop up shortly before she is due to return.  As I am a disciple of distraction she regularly walks through the door and catches me in my steel-toes trying to nudge clumps of dried mud out of sight against the mopboard, all the while sporting the same ghastly grin of ingratiation employed by cookie-thieving six-year-olds and willfully incontinent puppies.

        I meant to say thank you, and already I am off-track.  This is a recurring theme with my writing.  Not everyone is enamored of the tendency.  People sometimes ask me why I skip around, and I can only reply because that’s how it’s going in my head.  In the early years I attempted to write seamless prose.  I insisted on taking the reader by the elbow and gently introducing each narrative thread as if it were a timid child on its first day at a new school.  Then one day in the mid-1990s I sat in my old green chair and read several of the essays in Jim Harrison’s Just Before Dark, and as he jumped from haute cuisine to Budweiser to stag hunting in the South of France to ice fishing in Michigan and so on, it struck me that all my solicitous handholding was presumptive and made me not a Boy Scout but rather an overbearing lunkhead who mistrusted the navigational abilities of the unknown reader.  So now when I come to the end of a thought, I just jump.  I don’t always make the right leap.  Readers and reviewers sometimes point this out.  I don’t mind.  Nonstop encomiums artificially enhance the ego while softening one’s critical midsection, which is where the blows are absorbed.

        Originally this book was supposed to be about two things: The resurrection of my old pickup truck, and a year in the life of my garden.  I wanted to write a book about gardening because I was fed up with happy gardening books.  I felt it was time for a grim gardening book, and I’m eminently qualified.  I wanted to write about fixing up my truck because I dreamed of claiming brake pads as a business expense: Sadly, the tax lady said no.  The third thread – the real love story – came as a complete surprise.  Tangent of a lifetime, really.  Things are going good: I am currently in the process of trying to figure out how to adjust a four-point racing harness in order that it might secure a baby seat.

It’s fun to joke and ramble, but here’s the main deal: I am baffled and overjoyed at the wrong turns and coincidences leading to the book you’ve consented to discuss.  It would not even exist were it not for word-of-mouth: Readers talking to readers, book lovers talking about books.  And for that, I owe a great debt to book clubs.  Thanks.  Thanks.  For you, I remove my boots.

HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT TRUCK: A LOVE STORY?  Choose your club’s most burning question and mail it to Mike at bookclubquestion@sneezingcow.com.  As long as the internet is up and running and he retains control of his motor functions, he’ll type up an answer.     

flip flop

Ah, the first sign of summer. Flip flops out and that first irritation between the toes. Slightly annoying at first, 'til one realizes what it portends!

Blues Magoos

Found the LP online of my college roommate's favorite album - the Blues Magoos' Never Goin' Back to Georgia. Now I just have to track him down! Anyone know Jesse Schachter, circa Stony Brook and Queens?

a beach grows in Brooklyn

Was over at DUMBO late the other afternoon and what did I see, but a teeny pebble-covered beach on the East River! I loved it! The whole area was a slice of paradise under the 2 bridges.

pat on back from Patterson!

I love this news, courtesy of Bookselling This Week: Houston's Murder By The Book is the recipient of a 2007 James Patterson PageTurner Award in the amount of $2,500. The awards were created in 2005 by author James Patterson to recognize individuals, companies, schools, and other institutions that find original and effective ways to promote the excitement of books.

"What we love about this recognition is how Patterson targets individuals and organizations that spread the excitement of reading and books," said David Thompson, Murder By The Book's assistant manager and the founder of Busted Flush Press. "And we couldn't be more honored to be considered part of that group."

Other honors for the 28-year-old bookstore, owned by Martha Farrington, include a Mystery Writers of America Raven Award and nominations for the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award. Murder By The Book's inventory is mostly American and British new and used mysteries.

Thompson said he thought Murder By The Book was selected for the award because, like many independents, "We pride ourselves on our knowledge of the stock ... and helpful and passionate employees. It is our goal with each sale to share our excitement for books -- mysteries and thrillers, of course! -- and to give people a reason to support independent booksellers and local businesses. We try to make it fun and we hope our passion is contagious."

Murder By The Book is planning to use some of its award money to throw a small party for its loyal customers.

The winner of a $50,000 PageTurner Award is Literacy Partners, which provides free, community-based adult and family literacy programs to more than 25,000 New York City residents. First Book Marketplace, a subsidiary of the award-winning nonprofit organization First Book, an online store that sells high-quality children's books at deeply discounted prices to organizations serving children from low-income families, won $25,000. And One More Story, Inc., an online library of the best of children's classic and contemporary literature, also won $25,000. The full list of winners is available on the PageTurner website.

hot indie press

Check out the edgy, smart offerings at Melville House Publishing.

Spinal Tap meets Queen

From a colleague comes a story about Spinal Tap in a concert in the UK, with Christopher Guest going into a soaring solo. The crowd went nuts, and all the more so when Brian May of Queen came on stage, being the one who had actually played the solo! And this news via Shelf Awareness: Book Soup,featured an appearance by Queen guitarist Brian May, who instead of signing CDs or guitars, signed copies of Bang! The Complete History of the Universe (Johns Hopkins , $29.95, 9780801889851), which he co-wrote with astronomer Patrick Moore and astrophysicist Chris Lintott. Proud owner of Ph.D. in astrophysics, May met perhaps more Queen than Universe fans, although several apparently came in from far ends of the country, if not universe.

cover me

2 wonderful cover versions of 2 of my favorite all-time songs playing on XM of late: Jill Sobule covering Laura Nyro's Stoned Soul Picnic and Thomas Dolby (!) covering Dan Hicks' incredible I Scare Myself. 2 of the most beautiful, bittersweet, transportive songs of all time. At least I think so.

Amistad speaks..a wonderful new blog

My colleague Christina has started up a wonderful new blog about books, notably those by and about African-Americans.