Roy Miller's Blog, page 174
May 31, 2017
James Patterson Expands Bookseller Bonus Program
This content was originally published by on 31 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The bestselling author is renewing his Holiday Bookseller Bonus Program, which launched in 2015. He’s also adding more money to the mix this time around, increasing his donation by $100,000.
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David Sedaris On The Life-Altering And Mundane Pages Of His Old Diaries : NPR
This content was originally published by Terry Gross on 31 May 2017 | 5:13 pm.
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David Sedaris lives in West Sussex, England, where he’s known for picking up trash along the side of the road.
Ingrid Christie/Little, Brown and Company
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Ingrid Christie/Little, Brown and Company
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David Sedaris lives in West Sussex, England, where he’s known for picking up trash along the side of the road.
Ingrid Christie/Little, Brown and Company
Humorist David Sedaris admits that his latest work, Theft by Finding, isn’t exactly the book he set out to publish. It was originally meant to be a collection of funny diary entries, but then Sedaris’ editor had a suggestion that changed its course.
“My editor said, ‘Why don’t you go back to the very beginning and find things that aren’t necessarily funny and put those in as well?’ ” Sedaris says. “Soon those [entries] outweighed the funny ones, and the funny ones seemed almost over-produced, so I got rid of a lot of them.”
The result is a collection of moments pulled from the diaries Sedaris wrote between 1977 and 2002. Theft by Finding includes major turning points in Sedaris’ life: the NPR broadcast of excerpts from his SantaLand Diaries collection, meeting his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, and the death of his mother. But most of the entries are quieter moments in which Sedaris writes about cleaning houses for a living, doing drugs and observing patrons at IHOP.
Though Sedaris has published personal stories and books based on his journals before, the idea of pulling from decades-old diaries took some getting used to.
“Publishing a first draft of something you wrote when you were drunk and 21 — I’ll do it if it works and it’s inviting on the paper, but a lot of the entries in this book, they’re like three lines long,” he says. “I might’ve written four pages that day, but of those four pages the only thing that might be of interest to someone else are these three lines.”
Interview Highlights
On wanting to be a successful writer
I really don’t think anybody could’ve wanted it more. … I was picturing exactly the life that I have today. Exactly the life that I have. …
A lot of people don’t know what they want, or they’re just kind of vague about it. I was never vague. I knew exactly what I wanted.
David Sedaris
I recently saw that movie La La Land on a plane and it made me think about people who didn’t have dreams. There are plenty of people I know in my life who — I don’t mean to suggest in any way that they’re failures — but I don’t know that they ever wanted things, like were very specific about what it was that they wanted. …
A lot of people don’t know what they want, or they’re just kind of vague about it. I was never vague. I knew exactly what I wanted. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to get it, but it’s scary … because what if that doesn’t happen?
On how reading helps teach people how to write
There are folk artists out there who live in the woods, who have never been to a museum, who can create artwork that will move you, right? But there’s no such thing as a folk writer. There’s no such thing as somebody who’s never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. I don’t mean you have to go to school for it, but if you pay attention you can learn it by reading books.
On how he met his boyfriend Hugh
We met through a mutual friend, borrowing a ladder. That’s just such a nice story. I meet so many [couples] and I [say], “How did you guys meet?” and they say “OKCupid” or “Grindr,” so it sounds so very old fashioned to meet someone over a ladder. At least ladders still exist.
On how he reacted to friend and fellow writer David Rakoff‘s illness
You know how, like, when people get sick sometimes you just don’t want to acknowledge that they’re sick? … I think about [writer] David Rakoff. The last time I saw David he looked awful. … He had Hodgkin lymphoma years ago and then he had radiation for it, and then the radiation caused a new kind of cancer.
When I last saw him, I just said, “Alright, I’ll see you later.” And I knew I would never see him later, but it just seemed like if I had said more than that it was just burdening him. He was so brave and who was I to suggest that he wouldn’t get better?
On his sister Tiffany , who to ok her own life in 2013
My sister Tiffany was child number five. So she was the youngest girl and the second to the youngest child; there were six kids in the family.
It’s interesting. Looking back over her life, my mom never really liked Tiffany very much. Tiffany was too much like my mother, and I remember that as a child almost … I just thought, Ugh, wouldn’t want to be Tiffany. …
The rest of us should’ve said, “Mom, you need to do something about this, because that’s not OK for you to treat somebody that way.” But we never said that. We never called our mother on her behavior towards Tiffany. You think, You’re 7, what are you going to do? But I wasn’t always 7. I was 20 and I was 30. … Tiffany had a lot of anger at us and a lot of it was really well-founded. We were adults, we could’ve said to our mother, “This isn’t OK.” …
[Per Tiffany’s wishes] nobody [from the family] went to the memorial service. Her ashes went to somebody that she had worked with once, and my sister Lisa called this woman and said, “Could we have just a thimble full to scatter in the ocean behind the beach house?” And the woman said, “No.” I understand that. Tiffany didn’t want us to have them. The woman was just honoring Tiffany’s wishes.
On deciding to quit drinking after years of struggling to admit he was an alcoholic
I was on tour and it was one thing to be drinking like that at home, but it’s a lot to take that show on the road. … I would be on a book tour, and so I’m signing books, and let’s say I get back to the room at like 1 o’clock in the morning, and then it’s time to start drinking. … And then you order room service around 4. And then you get high, and, oh look, it’s 5:30 in the morning and it’s time for your car to come and take you to the airport. …
I had been wanting to quit for a long time. I was afraid to quit, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to write, because I started drinking shortly after I started writing. And then I kind of got it in my head that I needed to be drinking while I wrote. … I don’t know why I was so convinced of it, it’s like saying “I can’t sing unless I have a blue shirt on.”
Radio producers Sam Briger and Heidi Saman and Web producers Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper contributed to this story.
The post David Sedaris On The Life-Altering And Mundane Pages Of His Old Diaries : NPR appeared first on Art of Conversation.
John Grisham’s Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Popular Fiction
This content was originally published by JOHN GRISHAM on 31 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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“All suggestions can be ignored when necessary,” says the best-selling author, but ignore them at your own peril. (And put away that thesaurus.)
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BookExpo 2017: The Future of Publishing Is Now
This content was originally published by on 31 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The Future of Publishing panel used data and examples from the present moment to offer a vision of what lies ahead for the book industry.
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BookExpo 2017: Audiobooks Evolve in the Age of Podcasts
This content was originally published by on 31 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The growth in the popularity of audiobooks and podcasts is complementary, and audiobook publishers can take advantage of the immense popularity of podcasts.
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BookExpo 2017: Adult Editors Buzz Panel Thrills Booksellers
This content was originally published by on 31 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Six editors described this year’s selections as compelling tales of suspense during Wednesday’s Adult Editors Buzz Panel, which featured six forthcoming novels.
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Move Over, Royal Tenenbaums: Meet the Mighty Franks
This content was originally published by PETER HALDEMAN on 31 May 2017 | 5:22 pm.
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“The Mighty Franks” (the title comes from Aunt Harriet’s unironic appellation for her family) is set in the scrubby Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, traditional outpost of musicians and artists, rather than in the security-patrolled enclaves of Brentwood or Bel-Air. No hilltop palaces here, no People–covered weddings or medevac flights to Betty Ford. Still, this is a narrative that could unfold only in a place where fantasy and reality blur with treacherous ease.
At its center is Aunt “Hankie,” a theatrical and mercurial woman who might be described as the love child of Auntie Mame and Mommie Dearest. The author may have been raised (in the 1960s and ’70s) by Marty Frank, the owner of a medical-equipment business, and his wife, Merona, a homemaker, but his surrogate parents were Hankie, who was Marty’s sister, and Irving, who was Merona’s brother. (In this eccentrically intertwined clan, not only did brother and sister marry sister and brother, but their mothers — Michael’s grandmothers — also lived together.) A tall, formidable presence with a tower of auburn hair, a fake beauty mark and a slash of Salmon Ice lipstick, Aunt Hankie reels in Michael at a young age and — unhappily for the boy but goldenly for the memoirist — never lets him go.
After school or on Saturday mornings, she pilots her Buick Riviera into his parents’ driveway, sounds the horn and, in a cloud of men’s cologne from I. Magnin, whisks her nephew off on “larky” adventures. She takes him to his grandmothers’ apartment in Hollywood, or on antiquing expeditions, or to her own home nearby, a French-style manse obsessively decorated with her cannily scavenged treasures (“period, not mo-derne”). She devotes herself to indoctrinating Michael about art (Matisse is superior to Picasso), film (Truffaut over Welles), literature (Faulkner, not Hemingway). At 9 or 10 he is unable to do much more than inhale her glamour and parrot her outré opinions and pronouncements. “Follow the pleasure principle!” she exhorts. “Make beauty wherever you can!”
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“I considered her quite simply to be the most magical human being I knew,” Mr. Frank writes. “Everything she touched, everything she did, was golden, infused with a special knowledge and a teeming vitality.”
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There are early warning signs. Michael’s stomach is constantly knotted. He is bullied at school, called Suzie and regularly beaten up. His parents fret that Hankie’s doting on him is alienating his two brothers. After the death of Hankie’s revered mother, a story editor at MGM, she grows increasingly erratic and more controlling, he writes — of her nephew and everyone else in her orbit.
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Testing the boundaries as he gets older, Michael excuses himself from one of his aunt’s phone summonses; she hangs up on him and later berates him for his “heartlessness.” He begs off helping her with the decorations for her annual Christmas extravaganza; she cancels Christmas altogether, cutting off his family for weeks. She works a wedge between him and his parents, disparaging them in his presence. Anyone who comes between Hankie and her need to pull focus is tossed aside.
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The cover of Mr. Frank’s memoir.
Charming but passive, Uncle Irving is the family mediator, but his loyalties are always with Hankie. (He comes off as a textbook enabler, though the author never resorts to psychobabble.) The two of them build a grander, Hollywood Regency-style showplace in Laurel Canyon with parquet floors and 14-foot ceilings, stuffed with mementos from movie sets and the antiques Hankie hoards. “Her most sustained work of art,” the maison, as they humbly refer to it, is a stage set for Hankie to command, a backdrop against which to dispense tea and cucumber sandwiches and increasingly hollow-sounding Hankieisms.
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“It seemed perfectly logical to us that my aunt and uncle would live with tangible pieces of their movies,” Mr. Frank writes, “just as they spoke in dialogue-like speeches … or staged scenes that seemed to belong more to invented than to actual life.” The author connects the dots subtly between his relatives’ capacity for self-invention and their employment in the dream factory. “Everyone was acting” he says of his family’s denial of the cancer that killed a grandmother, “everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made).”
It’s not until he is out of high school that Michael can establish a healthy distance from Hankie, finding refuge in Europe. But even halfway around the world he can’t escape her clutches. She interrupts his travels in Paris, insisting he change his itinerary to accompany her to London. He refuses, she explodes — a kind of Kabuki by now.
Over time, the author’s understanding of his aunt gains nuance. “Surely it was fear that fed her anger,” he muses, “because isn’t fear what is always lying, snakelike, at the bottom of every basketful of rage? Fear at being out of control — of the decoration, the food, the moment, the conversation, the connections between other people, the story; always the story, which had to be as she saw (or invented or interpreted) it.”
There is a moment, years later — Uncle Irving is in the hospital with end-stage cancer, Aunt Hankie insisting that he be kept alive at any cost — when the adult Michael confronts his aunt over her selfishness and, in a rare flash of insight, she recognizes that he is right. But it’s just a moment.
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“I don’t do illness” is another Hankieism, but after fracturing her hip during an argument she refuses physical therapy and uses a wheelchair. She holes up in the maison, continuing to cram the place with new acquisitions: ceramic cherubs now, and other kitsch from thrift stores. The author traces her decline, both physical and aesthetic, in somber tones, but it also seems to have spurred his liberation.
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The post Move Over, Royal Tenenbaums: Meet the Mighty Franks appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Finish This Sentence #6 – Unusual Weapon of Choice
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 30 May 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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I had never seen it used as a weapon before, but when he tried to attack me with a ________, I couldn’t help but laugh. I wasn’t going to let him take the treasure from me—I needed it to save a life. (Write a story that follows these lines.)
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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May 30, 2017
Alistair Horne, War Historian and Onetime British Spy, Dies at 91
This content was originally published by WILLIAM GRIMES on 31 May 2017 | 1:25 am.
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“Occasionally an epic subject encounters a fine historian,” the historian Raymond Carr wrote in the British magazine The New Statesman. “This was the case with the Algerian war and Mr. Horne. The result is a book of compelling power, written with compassion and understanding.”
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Mr. Macmillan, impressed, approached Mr. Horne to write his official biography. It was published in two volumes in 1989 as “Harold Macmillan, Politician” in Britain and “Harold Macmillan” in the United States.
While he was in Washington researching American source material for the Macmillan biography, Mr. Horne became acquainted with Henry A. Kissinger, to whom he later presented a reissue of “A Savage War of Peace,” published in 2006 by The New York Review of Books with a new preface by the author. Mr. Kissinger requested that a copy be sent to the White House.
In a “60 Minutes” interview a few months later, President Bush mentioned that he was reading the book with great interest. Soon after, he invited Mr. Horne to visit him at the White House, and in May 2007 a meeting took place.
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“He questioned me closely about the parallels between Iraq and Algeria,” Mr. Horne wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 2007. “It was clear that he had read attentively what I had written.”
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In a later article about the meeting, in The Independent, Mr. Horne wrote: “I was questioned intently on how de Gaulle got out of Algeria; I had to reply, ‘Mr. President, very badly; he lost his shirt.’ Though it was clearly a disappointing response, Mr. Bush replied, with emphasis: ‘Well, we’re not going to get out of Iraq like that.’”
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Alistair Allan Horne was born on Nov. 9, 1925, in London. His mother, the former Auriol Hay-Drummond, died when he was 4 after her car slid off a Belgian road into a river, where she drowned.
His father, who had made a fortune in India, also met an untimely end, hit by a car as he walked the streets of London during the wartime blackout, in 1944.
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Mr. Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962,” published in 1977, was described as “a book of compelling power, written with compassion and understanding.”
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Alistair attended Ludgrove School, which he described as “a Belsen of the spirit” in his childhood memoir “A Bundle From Britain” (1993). After brief stints in Le Rosey, a boarding school in Rolle, Switzerland, and the top-drawer Stowe School, in Buckinghamshire, he was sent to the United States to escape the war.
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There he enrolled in Millbrook School in New York, where he found a lifelong friend in William F. Buckley Jr., the future conservative polemicist.
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Mr. Horne turned down a Harvard scholarship to return to Britain, where he enlisted in the Royal Air Force but, because of poor eyesight, failed to qualify for pilot training.
He later joined the Coldstream Guards, attaining the rank of captain. He was sent to Palestine and placed in charge of intelligence gathering under Maurice Oldfield, who later became the head of MI6.
When the war ended, he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and stationed in Cairo, monitoring Soviet activity in the Balkans.
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After earning an M.A. in English in 1949 from Jesus College, Cambridge, Mr. Horne served briefly as an intelligence officer in Yugoslavia before trying his hand at journalism.
For several years in the early 1950s he filed stories for The Daily Telegraph from West Berlin while supervising three agents for MI6, a task that required him to ferry secret documents in a false-bottomed suitcase. He came to grief when he refused to get up in the middle of the night to check the arrival time of a train for the wife of the newspaper’s publisher, an offense that earned him a ticket to London.
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He resigned from the newspaper, but his foreign reporting provided the material for his first book, “Back Into Power,” published in the United States in 1956 as “Return to Power: A Report on the New Germany.”
In 1953 he married Renira Hawkins, whom he divorced in 1982. He is survived by his wife, Sheelin Lorraine Ryan; three daughters from his first marriage, Camilla Swift, Alexandra Berven and Vanessa Horne; and five grandchildren.
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His many books on France include “The French Army and Politics, 1870–1970” (1984), “Seven Ages of Paris” (2002) , “The Age of Napoleon” (2004) and “La Belle France: A Short History” (2005).
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With Mr. Buckley, he visited Chile in the early 1970s to take stock of Salvador Allende’s short-lived experiment in socialism, a journey that inspired “Small Earthquake in Chile: A Visit to Allende’s South America” (1972), a blend of travelogue and political reporting. He also produced a second volume of memoirs, “But What Do You Actually Do?: A Literary Vagabondage,” published in 2011.
Mr. Horne turned down the opportunity to write the official biography of Mr. Kissinger, citing his advanced age and the vast trove of documentation that he would have to confront. “Most people measure their material in feet,” he told the website Salon in 2007. “His material is said to total 33 tons.” Instead, he wrote the narrowly focused study, “Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year” (2009).
At the time of his death, Mr. Horne, who was knighted in 2003, was at work on “Battles Which Changed the World.”
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The Icelandic publisher that only prints books during a full moon – then burns them | Books
This content was originally published by James Reith on 31 May 2017 | 5:30 am.
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For Tunglið, how you publish is as important as what you publish. Named after the Icelandic word for the moon, the tiny publisher prints its books in batches of 69 on the night of a full moon. So far, so weird. But keen readers must also buy their books that same night, as the publisher burns all unsold copies. Weirder still.
Why? While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – “uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.”
The masterminds are writer Dagur Hjartarson and artist Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson. Three years ago, the pair were discussing some promising manuscripts that they knew were languishing unpublished, and started to formulate a plan to make these books appear. But doing so, they decided, would also “have to involve making them disappear”.
Precisely why the latter was necessary is hard to discern – but nonetheless, Tunglið was born.
Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson (left) and Dagur Hjartarson. Photograph: Lilja Birgisdóttir
Hjartarson and Ólafsson asked to be quoted as a “dual entity”, joking that they must toe a “party line”. Jokes and not taking publishing too seriously seem integral to Tunglið. Asking about their anti-profit business model, I am corrected: “Tunglið is not a business, so there is no business model.”
[We] use only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames.
Is this all a satire, then, of publishing and capitalism in general? Not really; Ólafsson and Hjartarson’s “aim is not to make any point … We tend not to take the rules of the game too seriously so in that way, it might seem satirical.”
One topic they do take (somewhat) seriously is the artistic nature of their book burnings. At their sole incineration outside Iceland – in Basel, Switzerland – they had a difficult time persuading the locals that this was “a poetic act, not a political one”.
They assure me that they burn books “with a lot of care and respect, using only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames”. They claim the burnings “have nothing to do with history, censorship or politics”. Instead, the procedure has to do with the politics of the book itself. Unsurprisingly, they describe their publishing list as “unconventional” – books that are hard to classify. They want to keep these challenging books available, whether it be Icelandic poet Óskar Árni Óskarsson’s Cuban Diary from 1983 or Ólafsson’s own Letters from Bhutan. “The printed book is a democratic object,” they argue, but one being “pushed to the margins” as some publishers are trying to save the book “by turning it into a luxury item”; a desirable object prized for its commercial value rather than its contents.
But aren’t Tunglið’s small print runs and book burnings undemocratic, because they limit who can access their books? “Democratic,” they tell me, “doesn’t mean limitless abundance or unlimited supply – but it should mean fair process.” Their books are cheap, cannot be pre-ordered and no one can jump the queue at their events – fair, in other words. “Everyone is welcomed,” they stress – but they do acknowledge that making their books scarce is fundamental to what they do.
“This might look like a contradiction,” they continue. “If so we are sorry, but not sorry. We just try to do what feels right, funny or beautiful, or preferably all three.”
The core question still remains: why? “There’s a contradiction at the centre of things,” they tell me, “and so it is with Tunglið”. They both love and hate that books “strive for permanence”, and how we attempt to “reconcile ourselves with impermanence by making permanent things”. Writing a book is, for some writers, a deluded attempt at immortality. Tunglið saves its authors from this delusion.
What it provies, they say, is a kind of liberation. “The energy of the act of publishing is condensed and amplified. A lot of waiting, doubting and worrying, self-promotion and plugging is simply eliminated,” they say. This still doesn’t quite explain Tunglið – but if you don’t get it, Hjartarson and Ólafsson aren’t about to help. “We try to stay true to a certain logic,” they say, “but this is the logic of a poem, not of prose.” And it’s hard to hold a poem to account.
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