Roy Miller's Blog, page 256
March 4, 2017
Home on the Range: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
This spring, cookbooks are coming home. New titles target readers who want to make the most of their kitchens, whether that means learning the basics, mastering new skills or a single dish, saving time and money at mealtimes, or taking full advantage of their arsenal of gadgets.
The Fundamentals
Cookbook publishers are taking readers back to school with “Cooking 101”–style titles that tutor novices in the basics and help more seasoned chefs refine their skills.
America’s Test Kitchen has long produced cookbooks that teach basic techniques, and Adam Kowit, executive editor at ATK, says that, though these fundamental titles represent a renewable audience, what constitutes the fundamentals changes over time.
“Does a basics cookbook have to start with boiling an egg?” Kowit asks. “Our research showed that new cooks—not only millennials, because it could be someone of any age—want to learn cooking in different ways. The challenge is redefining what the fundamentals are and finding new ways of bringing this information to our audience.”
James Beard Award–winning author and cooking instructor Patricia Wells, who has schools in Paris and Provence, says that her latest book, My Master Recipes (Morrow, Mar.), draws on her 25 years as an instructor, with 165 recipes that teach culinary techniques such as blanching, searing, simmering, sweating, steaming, braising, and deep frying.
The abundance of resources for the modern home cook—Internet recipes and video instruction, ready access to once-obscure ingredients, an ever-growing array of cooking equipment—has not replaced fundamentals cookbooks, Wells says, but instead yielded a greater desire to learn. “Years ago, students came for a nice batch of recipes and menus, as well as a good time in the kitchen and at the table,” she says. “Today, students have much greater access to information and can [follow] their passions, be they grilling, or smoking, or cooking sous vide. They don’t approach cooking the way our mothers did.”
Samin Nosrat developed her approach to cooking and teaching, after landing a job at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse; Michael Pollan may be Nosrat’s best-known student. Her method, which focuses on four elements—salt and fat for flavor, acid for balance, and heat for texture—forms the basis for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Simon & Schuster, Apr.), with illustrations by graphic journalist Wendy McNaughton.
Nosrat says that, for many people, learning to cook is an antidote, and an adjunct, to the pervasiveness of screen time. “So much of our time is spent in this abstract world,” she says. “There’s this hunger for the simplest things—using your hands, and connecting with people around the table. I used to give this talk about how cooking is so important, and so vital to us, it will never be overtaken by digital life.”
Nosrat believes that’s still true, though social media is exerting an influence: “People who are obsessed with their Instagram likes want to have the perfect runny egg yolk.” She hopes her book will help new cooks ease up on themselves. “We’re constantly being pelted with people who are the best at what they do. Dinner doesn’t need to be this grand thing with 10 different sauces.”
This sentiment resonates with several publishers PW spoke with, who see the back-to-basics mindset as a response to the recent dominance of professional-chef-authored books.
“In the last few years,” says Lia Ronnen, publisher at Artisan, “there have been so many impenetrable, chef-y cookbooks, designed more like monographs than teaching tools, that I think the market is desperate for a book that puts the reader’s interests first.”
To that end, Ronnen signed up the first book by Alison Cayne, owner of Haven’s Kitchen, a cooking school in New York City. Ronnen had taken classes there and felt confident that “their philosophy would be a wonderful basis for a beginner’s cookbook.”
The Haven’s Kitchen Cooking School teaches the reader how to cook, not just to follow a recipe, Ronnen says. Each of the book’s nine chapters centers on a key lesson: the vegetables chapter is a tutorial on seasonality; the sauce chapter focuses on balance.
Anne Ficklen, executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, echoes Ronnen’s take on the resurgence of cookbooks marketed toward the home chef. “Many recent bestsellers have been personality driven, so it isn’t surprising people want fundamental titles as a balance,” she says. “Learning the basics lets people make food exactly the way they want, not how someone else likes it.”
In March, HMH will release a book that could be filed under “new basics”: Robin Robertson’s Veganize It, a primer for preparing homemade versions of store-bought vegan products, which have become increasingly available as vegan cuisine has gone mainstream. Robertson has written 20 vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, among them Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, which has sold more than 108,000 print copies since 2004, according to NPD BookScan. In the introduction to her new book, she explains why readers might want to make their own dairy-free sour cream or vegan sausage rather than buy it in the supermarket: packaged products “can be expensive, highly processed, full of preservatives, or not to your liking.”
Aside from these motivations, count Robertson’s editor among those who cite the influence of social media. “People are inspired to share their DIY experience,” Ficklen says. “The process is as important as the final product.”
Zeroing In
While some cookbooks present a wide-angle view of cooking techniques, others focus on the mastery of a single subject. Here, too, foodie culture in the digital realm may have something to do with the growing demand to take a deep dive into a single dish.
“The Internet has transformed the way a lot of people cook,” says Camaren Subhiyah, editor at Abrams. “There are millions of recipes and video tutorials at our fingertips. You can definitely go down a rabbit hole researching a single subject online, but it’s not always the best format for learning and you’re not always getting quality information from a credible source.”
In April, Abrams will release Joe Beddia’s Pizza Camp, which concentrates on the basics of pizza making, recreating the pies Beddia serves out of his tiny Philadelphia shop. The book hinges on old-fashioned process and technique, including extensive sections on the dish’s building blocks: dough, sauce, and cheese.
In May, Norton will release its guide to a classic breakfast offering—the “test dish” for chefs auditioning in a new restaurant, according editorial director Ann Treistman. In The Perfect Omelet, John E. Finn, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute who teaches courses on cuisine and culture at Wesleyan University, explores four core techniques of omelet making—a classic French omelet, an American diner omelet, a frittata, and a dessert omelet.
“People like to master something,” Treistman says, when asked why single-subject books attract readers. “Our attention is pulled in so many directions, and we’re always trying to juggle so many things, that it’s kind of a wonderful meditation to focus on learning a single task, and do it as well as possible.”
Stocks and broths, often a footnote in generalized cookbooks, take center stage in Rachael Mamane’s Mastering Stocks and Broths (Chelsea Green, June). Mamane, owner of small-scale broth company Brooklyn Bouillon, delves into the science of stock making and provides more than 100 recipes that incorporate stocks and broths as foundational ingredients.
Makenna Goodman, senior editor at Chelsea Green, says that the abundance of online information makes some cooks seek out complete immersion in one subject. The problem with this kind of access is there are too many choices, and people often feel overwhelmed, she says. “They need to be trained by a master, step-by-step. This doesn’t happen by watching a YouTube video.”
Know Thy Tools
Home cooks love their gadgets: in 2016, three of the top 10 bestselling titles of the year were devoted to a single kitchen tool—the Inspiralizer, the air fryer, and the electric pressure cooker. Those books continue to do well; The Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook (Rockridge), for example, has already sold 45,000 print copies this year, per BookScan.
Adams Media is among the publishers picking up on the trend, with the April release of The “I Love My Instant Pot” Recipe Book by Michelle Fagone. “We’ve been publishing small appliance and gadget-specific books for a while, starting with slow cookers and pressure cookers and now moving onto newer gadgets,” says Brendan O’Neill, Adams’s editorial director. Appliance-based titles sell well for the publisher, he says, and, like the readership for basic cooking skills, the readership for tie-in books is a renewable one, as gadgets continually earn new devotees looking to maximize their purchases.
But not all hot appliances are new ones. America’s Test Kitchen has seen “mammoth” success, Kowit says, with its slow cooker titles; 2011’s Slow Cooker Revolution, for one, has sold 270,000 print copies, according to BookScan. “While we’re always looking out for new items as they come on the market,” he says, “we also look at what people already have in their kitchens and maybe aren’t using to full advantage.”
Recently, the food processor stood out as a common but underused kitchen tool, owned by a vast majority of ATK’s readers yet untapped as a cookbook topic, Kowit says. After putting the appliance through its paces—grinding burger meat, making pizza dough, mixing cake batter, and more—the result is Food Processor Perfection, which the publisher will release in May.
Page Street is turning its attention to an older kitchen staple with Cast Iron Gourmet by Megan Keno (Aug.). Even classic cookware can require some instruction before use, and Will Kiester, publisher at Page Street, says kitchen tool tie-in books pick up where product manuals leave off, expanding on the essentials while not overwhelming the reader.
Saving Time and Money
The coming months bring titles that respond to the shrinking amount of time modern life allows for homemade meals, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ever-increasing desire to shop local, cook quick and clean, and deep-six the takeout on hectic weeknights—all while staying on budget.
In March, Grand Central Life & Style is publishing Scraps, Wilt & Weeds by Mads Refslund, one of the initial partners at the internationally acclaimed Danish restaurant Noma. Acquiring editor Karen Murgolo, the v-p and editorial director at Life & Style, says that Refslund’s no-waste philosophy is perfect for budget- and eco-conscious home cooks.
“I think everyone has been made aware of how much produce America throws out,” Murgolo says. “People are trying to buy better quality and more organic food—and that type of food is more expensive, so you don’t want to waste any of it.”
Scribner is courting ambitious but overscheduled home chefs in Elettra Wiedemann’s The Impatient Foodie (June). The author, Refinery29’s food editor, aims to adapt the ideals of the slow food movement to the realities of busy schedules.
“So many of us have become aware of the profound effect food choices have on our health and the environment,” says Shannon Welch, executive editor at Scribner. “But when we get home from a long day the last thing we want to do is spend hours in the kitchen.”
New York Times food columnist Melissa Clark has also set her sights on high-impact, low-labor weeknight eating. In Dinner (Clarkson Potter, Mar.), each recipe is intended to stand alone, or almost alone, with minimal or no side dishes. Small flourishes—charred lemons, or a touch of horseradish—add flavor. (For our profile of Clark, see “Dinner Is Served,” p. 34.)
British social media sensation Izy Hossack shares her (mostly) gluten-free or vegan recipes with more than 222,000 Instagram followers. In her second cookbook, The Savvy Cook (Mitchell Beazley, July), the 20-year-old, who blogs at Top with Cinnamon, offers menu plans and charts to help budget-conscious cooks give leftovers a makeover.
Parrish Ritchie, in her Life with the Crust Cut Off blog, takes time saving a step further, writing about preparing meals for her family quickly, using a few store-bought components to jump-start the processes. Countryman Press is publishing a book based on the blog, Halfway Homemade, in August.
Parrish suggests using rotisserie chicken, store-bought biscuit dough, and frozen vegetables to get chicken potpies on the table more quickly; sugar cookie mix, banana pudding, cream cheese, and ice cream toppings come together as banana split cookie bites. “Preparing home-cooked meals can be just as easy as piling the family into the car to hit the drive-through,” says Aurora Bell, an editor at Countryman. “Cooking at home gives busy families a chance to relax and spend time together, and in many cases it’s significantly cheaper than eating out.” Or, as food editor Sam Sifton recently wrote in the New York Times, thrift is the new takeout.
Below, more on the subject of cookbooks.
Bring the Funk: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
Books on preserving food are perennial favorites, and this season, fermentation steps into the spotlight.
Not Your Bubbe’s Kasha Varnishkes: Jewish Cookbooks
For many people in the U.S., the phrase “Jewish cooking” calls to mind a specific kind of dish: “heavy, old-fashioned, and maybe not very good for one’s health,” says Kim Lim, assistant editor at Skyhorse.
Southeast Asian Cooking: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
Dishes from Southeast Asia have become more prevalent on American restaurant menus and, increasingly, in Americans’ cookbook collections.
Stocking the Shelves: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
New titles teach the fundamentals, deep-dive into single ingredients, help home cooks save time and money, and more.
Cooking 101: Cookbook Authors Offer Tricks of the Trade
Five cookbook authors offer tips for novice cooks, discuss their favorite kitchen tools, and more.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Home on the Range
The post Home on the Range: Spring 2017 Cookbooks appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Stephen Karam on Pain, Despair, and the Enduring Power of Great Writing
Stephen Karam talks to Paul Holdengraber about the joy of the human condition, while mining its depths for art.
Stephen Karam on getting at the truth through the human condition…
I’m interested in trying to get at the truth, whatever my own truths are—the questions I’m trying to answer or explore… It’s reflective of my view of life or how I see people and how I see the human condition. I think there is so much pain, but there is also so much joy and wonder and magic that comes with being alive.
Stephen Karam on diving into despair to release pain…
I really do hope that my work makes people feel less alone and that it’s the despair that takes them out of it. In other words, I like going into the basement as far down as I can go, not because I want to drag people down into the murkiness of despair and all that’s depressing about life, but because I actually feel like that’s how you can release the kind of grip that anxiety and pain can have on your life.
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Stephen Karam on the everlasting power of a great text…
When a work is that good—when you’re reading Chekhov or reading any great writer—the text continues to surprise and continues to reveal secrets.
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Tracking Unit Print Sales for Week Ending February 26, 2017
Unit sales of print books at outlets that report to NPD BookScan inched ahead 0.6% in the week ended Feb. 26, 2017, compared to the similar week in 2016. The increase was led by the adult segments, in which both the fiction and nonfiction categories posted 2% gains from the week ended Feb. 28, 2016. The gain in the adult nonfiction category was helped by the release of The Legend of Zelda: Arts and Artifacts, which sold nearly 29,000 copies, making it the category’s top seller. Another book that had a good week was the long-running bestseller by Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey, which sold more than 17,000 copies, moving it into third place on the category list. In its first week on sale, Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas sold more than 17,000 copies in mass market paperback, landing it in second place on the adult fiction bestseller list. A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman jumped up one spot in the week to #1, selling more 21,000 copies. Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 continued to rise, putting the novel in fourth place on the category list with more 16,000 copies sold. Unit sales in both the juvenile fiction and nonfiction categories fell 2% in the week from the equivalent week in 2016. Dr. Seuss titles continued to dominate the juvenile fiction bestseller list; Green Eggs and Ham remained #1 with more than 20,000 copies sold. The only real movement on the juvenile nonfiction bestseller list was of Animals, whose sales rose 61% from the prior week and put it in fifth place on the category bestseller list, with almost 6,000 copies sold.
Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel
Feb. 28, 2016
Feb. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Total
11,631
11,707
0.6%
1%
Mass Merch./Other
2,061
1,753
-12%
-15%
Retail & Club
9,570
9,955
2%
4%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Category
Feb. 28, 2016
Feb. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Adult Nonfiction
4,748
4,835
2%
0.6%
Adult Fiction
2,424
2,485
2%
1%
Juvenile Nonfiction
989
971
-2%
-2%
Juvenile Fiction
3,121
3,054
-2%
-3%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Format
Feb. 28, 2016
Feb. 26, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Hardcover
3,046
3,160
-4%
1%
Trade Paperback
6,396
6,530
-2%
-0.6%
Mass Market Paperback
1,184
1,033
-12%
-8%
Board Books
720
674
-6%
3%
Audio
60
62
3%
-3%
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Weekly Scorecard
The post Tracking Unit Print Sales for Week Ending February 26, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Protesters Disrupt Speech by ‘Bell Curve’ Author at Vermont College
The left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center describes Mr. Murray as a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
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As word spread on Friday about the confrontation, commentators weighed in. Bill Kristol, the conservative analyst and editor at large of The Weekly Standard, said on Twitter:
What happened at Middlebury to Charles Murray threatens not just campus free speech, but free speech--indeed freedom in America--generally.
—
Bill Kristol (@BillKristol)
March 3, 2017
Brit Hume, the Fox News analyst, wrote:
Intolerant left strikes again -->Angry Students Disrupt Conservative Scholar’s Speech At Middlebury College https://t.co/jYEbbXm9Na
—
Brit Hume (@brithume)
March 3, 2017
But an open letter to the college from more than 450 alumni objecting to Mr. Murray’s presence on campus said it was not a matter of free speech. The letter, written before Thursday’s event, said that his views were offensive and based on shoddy scholarship and that they should not be legitimized.
“In this case, there’s not really any ‘other side,’ only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry,” the letter said.
Ms. Patton, the Middlebury president, said in her apology that there had been “clear violations of Middlebury College policy” against disrupting events. University officials said they were investigating both the disruptions inside the building and the violence outside.
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Bill Burger, a spokesman for the college, said in an interview: “There are people who are eager to portray college students or the entire higher education establishment as hopelessly out of touch, a bastion of liberal indoctrination, and I think that’s fundamentally false. However, events like last night’s do feed that false narrative.”
Mr. Murray had been invited to the campus by the American Enterprise Institute Club, a group of about a dozen generally conservative-leaning students.
Hayden Dublois, 21, a senior and treasurer of the club, said that the students had thought Mr. Murray — whose 2012 book, “Coming Apart,” examines the white working class — would be interesting to hear in light of the presidential election.
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But when Mr. Murray rose to speak, he was shouted down by most of the more than 400 students packed into the room, several witnesses said. Many turned their backs to him and chanted slogans like “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!”
After almost 20 minutes, it was clear that he would not be able to give his speech, said Mr. Burger, the spokesman. Anticipating that such an outcry might happen, Mr. Murray was moved to a separate room equipped with a video camera so that Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor of international politics and economics, could interview him over a live stream. Mr. Burger said the administration felt strongly that Mr. Murray’s right to free speech should be protected and that “no one should have the heckler’s veto.”
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Once the interview began in the second room, protesters swarmed into the hallway, chanting and pulling fire alarms. Still, the interview was completed and officials, including Ms. Stanger, escorted Mr. Murray out the back of the building.
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There, several masked protesters, who were believed to be outside agitators, began pushing and shoving Mr. Murray and Ms. Stanger, Mr. Burger said. “Someone grabbed Allison’s hair and twisted her neck,” he said.
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After the two got into a car, Mr. Burger said, protesters pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood. Ms. Stanger later went to a hospital, where she was put in a neck brace.
Mr. Dublois, the student, said he was disappointed. “To see protests, which really developed into riots — which is what they were — was incredibly shameful and embarrassing.”
The car drove off to a dinner nearby, but officials say they learned that protesters intended to disrupt it, so they drove to a restaurant out of town.
Continue reading the main story
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March 3, 2017
In Praise of Bossy Big Sisters
Like many young girls, I fell in love with the Little House series when I was about seven years old. What followed was two or three years of obsession; I read the books repeatedly, developed a fondness for long dresses, and regularly wore my hair in two braids. My grandma even made me two sunbonnets that I insisted on wearing everywhere in the summer, despite Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own hatred of them. But unlike a lot of young girls, I didn’t identify with the main character: the headstrong, outspoken Laura. Instead, I was more enamored of Laura’s big sister Mary.
In many ways, Mary and Laura are opposites. Mary is better at chores than Laura, has better manners, and takes better care of her toys. She gets scared more easily than her adventurous sister, and is happier indoors than out. In the first book in the series, 1932’s Little House in The Big Woods, Ingalls Wilder describes her thusly:
Mary was a good little girl who always kept her dress clean and neat and minded her manners. Mary had lovely golden curls . . .
To put it bluntly, Mary is a bit of a goody-two-shoes. But I loved her because I was also the oldest of four children; I was blonde; I was a shy; and, alright, I was a bit of a goody-two-shoes, too.
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But as I got older, I realized that you’re not supposed to like Mary—she’s too annoyingly perfect, especially after sudden blindness turns her into something of a saintlike figure. On the other hand, Laura is plucky. She’s her father’s favorite. On the covers of the middle books, On The Banks Of Plum Creek and By The Shores of Silver Lake, she’s shown alone, in adventurous and improper action, brown hair streaming behind her. On Plum Creek, she strides across the roof of her dugout home, blue dress lifted above her knees; on Silver Lake, she’s riding a galloping brown horse. Again, she’s barefoot, and her hair looks just like the horse’s mane. Mary is the focus of only one cover—Little Town on the Prairie—where she’s standing in a doorway, holding a tiny kitten. Her hair is neatly covered by a sunbonnet. You can’t see her feet, but I bet she has her shoes on.
Mary Ingalls was a real person, but the version of her we read in the Little House books is heavily fictionalized; Ingalls Wilder changed many details about her family life in the books, including erasing one sibling, aging another one up, changing the length and dates the Ingalls family spent in each place they lived, and even rewriting the illness that made Mary blind. When I think about the books now, I can’t help but fixate on Mary and the way she’s written.
Especially because she’s not alone. There are so many rule-following, annoyingly-perfect, bossy older sisters in classic children’s literature, and—precisely because the reader is supposed to root against them in favor of the plucky, rule-breaking younger sister—I want to defend them all.
In one of the most famous books about sibling relationships, another oldest sister is listed first in the title—Little Women: Or Meg, Jo, Beth And Amy, as it was first called in 1868 before the subtitle was dropped. But, like in the Little House books, she’s definitely not the sister you’re supposed to root for. The sister you’re supposed to root for, obviously, is Jo—the bookish, adventurous, hot-headed second sister. In many ways, Meg and Jo’s relationship is similar to Mary and Laura’s. Like Mary, Meg is pretty, homey, and, has the best manners of her sisters. One of the first times Meg speaks in the novel is to “lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion,” telling Jo, “You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn’t matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.”
It was harder for me to love Meg than to love Mary, but rereading Little Women recently, I was struck by Meg’s ability to take charge of her family—first, her sisters, especially when their mother leaves them to take care of their wounded father; and later, her husband and twin children. Meg is often thought to be the boring, domestic, traditional one, but she’s also the first character to hold a real job; she spends her days as a governess. (I’m not counting Jo’s and later Amy’s jobs reading to their cranky but wealthy aunt.) In many ways, Little Women shows how Meg, as the eldest, has to grow up quicker than her sisters. And though it has much less dramatic potential than Jo cutting off her hair, Meg’s commitment to taking care of her family while working simultaneously is in some ways the more impressive act.
The unfairness of being a (fictional) older sister might be most apparent in the Ramona series, particularly as Beezus very quickly goes from supporting character to main character to antagonist—and stays there. She first appears as Henry’s friend in Beverly Cleary’s novels Henry Huggins and Henry and Beezus, published in 1950 and 1952; finally gets to be the main character in 1955’s Beezus and Ramona; and then becomes the bossy, goody-two-shoes big sister for the remaining eight Ramona books. When I mentioned writing about oldest sisters in children’s fiction, my aunt, the youngest of four siblings, joked, “Oh please! Beezus got her name in an entire half of one book title. AND, she got the pleasure of having a little sister. What more could she want?”
When commiserating with fellow eldest sisters, a few brought up more recent representations—like Meg from A Wrinkle In Time (1963) or Violet from A Series Of Unfortunate Events (1999)—as examples of eldest sisters you’re supposed to root for, but who are still forced to take on a “mothering” role to their younger siblings. This reminded me of Roberta from 1906’s The Railway Children, who has many of the same traits as Meg March and Mary Ingalls—responsible, bossy, boringly, morally good—but is also definitely the main character. As the narrator tells us. “Mothers never have favorites, but if their Mother HAD had a favourite, it might have been Roberta.”
Other eldest sisters brought up the ‘80s and ‘90s Baby-Sitters Club series and its Little Sister spinoffs. “I always thought Karen was a little shit,” one friend confessed, noting that she preferred big sister Kristy, the President of the babysitters’ club who kicked it all off in Kristy’s Big Idea. Kristy and Karen prove that nothing much has changed in the century and a half since Meg and Jo: Kristy is responsible enough to voluntarily take care of small children for fun and profit, while Karen is the adventurous one: the first book in the Little Sisters spinoff series follows Karen as she investigates her neighbor to find out if she’s a real witch or not.
There might be some truth in life to these character types; thousands of scientists have studied the birth order effect, after all. I’m glad, though, that even if more recent fictional older sisters still have to take care of their siblings, they also get to create on-the-fly inventions like Violet Baudelaire, or fight and defeat a giant creepy brain like Meg Murray, or even, at least, get paid for their care-taking, like Kristy does. But even when they aren’t so exceptional, it seems that big sisters in children’s literature are independent, responsible, bossy, rule-obsessed, mothering, goody-two-shoes in any era—and I’m rooting for every last one of them.
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PW Picks: Books of the Week, March 6, 2017
This week: Dan Chaon's terrifying masterpiece, plus an espionage novel set during the October Revolution of 1917.
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How Postcards From My Mother Helped Me Survive Childhood
For years, my mother wrote to me every day.
I’d been sent away to boarding school and for the first weeks was forbidden to call home. I was eleven. This was just before mobile phones came beeping and clicking into the lives of everyday people. I did not yet have an email address.
About two weeks into my new school life, a rumor started. It seems absurd now. The rumor was this—I was going to bring Hitler back from the dead. If you spoke to me, your family would die. I had never shown an interest in Nazis, but I had made the mistake of asking a girl what an Ouija board was. Somehow the story of my small question twisted, turned, and grew fangs.
A friend came to me alone. She smiled. She touched my arm. She told me she couldn’t risk speaking to me anymore. Afterwards, I wondered how anyone thought I could control the dead. I couldn’t even get one living girl to stay my friend. Our housemistress took me aside to say that she knew I wasn’t a witch, but could I please tell the other girls I wouldn’t kill their families? Then she gave me a chocolate biscuit.
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I cried alone. The ban on phone calls was still active. I held the latest postcard from my mother in my lap and felt the points press into my fingertips. I don’t remember the drawing on the front or the words on the back, just the tips of the cardboard.
I’d be at that school for five years. Five years of falling asleep hugging my pillow and five years of postcards. Often the postcards were about the postcards themselves. Look they’d say this is such a cute tiger! I liked this tiger. Or they’d tell me where my mother bought the postcard. Or why she’d soon have to stop writing the postcard. Got to go train arriving. Frequently, her handwriting would be illegible. She has a big looping cursive that looks beautiful but sometimes all those swashes get tangled.
I loved them for their presence more than their content. These were my rectangles of home. I tiled my small section of wall with them. Some fell down the side of the bed. Others got crumpled. Some became bookmarks. I wasn’t careful with them. I was sure there would always be more. More letters. More tigers. More carefully chosen stamps. Now, I wish I’d put them in scrapbooks. That I’d date ordered them. That I hadn’t left so many behind at the end of each year.
Eventually, the rumor died down. Still, girls read my diary out loud. At times, I heard people talking about me as I rounded a corner. Often I sat on the school coach alone. There was a brief rumor that I talked to trees. I was, in fact, talking to myself. My mother mailed me a selection of Orwell’s essays. In Why I Write, he wrote of how as a young man he continually described his actions as if he were the narrator of his own life. “For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.’” In the context of the essay, this is not meant as writing advice so much as a description of the behavior of a lonely young man. But I was a lonely child. And so I walked along the path, describing the flint beneath my feet. I spoke of the pines beside the path that pointed up like so many arrowheads. I described the clicking of the shoes of the other girls and their noise like seagulls laughing above a pile of soggy chips found on a seashore bench. My descriptions were long, and distinctly un-Orwellian—full of too many adjectives and too many words. But they filled my days.
The natural thing would have been to write these meanderings down. I didn’t. Not in a diary and not in letters to my mother. In fact, I never wrote to my mother. Every day, a new rectangle would appear in my narrow pigeonhole, but I never thought she’d want or need my words.
By then, I was allowed to talk to her on the school telephone and that was what I did. I pressed the big black handset to the side of my face and crouched on the floor. The telephone was inside a cupboard. The top half of the door had glass windows cut into it, but the bottom was solid wood. I sat on the ground because I did not like to be seen. I do not remember what we talked about. The sadness I felt as a child was a big, mute thing.
I knew I was lucky. I knew that this was a good school. I was lonely, but I never went hungry. I had no friends, but I had a mother who loved me. I knew this because even though we talked on the phone, she never stopped writing. She took the time to do both. Only a parent will write and write and write and never demand that you write back. Later, I’d dedicate my first novel to her. I’m not sure how our word counts stack up side by side, but I don’t think my words will ever measure up to the sheer volume of her love.
I asked her about my time at that school. How could you have left me there? How could you have made me sleep in the same room as people who laughed at me and who read my diary aloud to one another? She said, we didn’t know. All kids hate school. We didn’t know. I believe her. For many years, I was angry. Even now, friends hold my hand tight in any movie about bullying. Still, however sad I was, however alone, I had those postcards. Every night as I fell asleep, the pale light from the lamp outside touched their glossed surfaces and the curved heads of the pins that held them in place. I knew she loved me.
Recently, I’ve been traveling a lot to promote my first novel. I have found myself wandering down strange streets describing them in my head. Calgary is cold in a way that gets inside your knee-joints. In Amsterdam, the light from my bicycle hangs like a pale ghost on the curving roads. The Hague is full of crows. Montreal’s autumn leaves are yellow and purple.
In each of these cities, I bought a postcard or two. I didn’t write about the way the altitude moved in my blood. I didn’t write about wandering down the half-familiar aisles of foreign supermarkets. On one, I drew a picture. In another, I remembered that when I was young we grew wild strawberries. I wondered, how could they be wild if we planted them? These messages weren’t important. But I believe that sending them was. Maybe the person on the other end is happy. Maybe they are safe. Maybe they are lucky and their pains are small. But who doesn’t need an extra rectangle of love?
The post How Postcards From My Mother Helped Me Survive Childhood appeared first on Art of Conversation.
GIVEAWAY: Win Online Marketing for Busy Authors
Our March issue (now on newsstands) is all about marketing, self-promotion, and being an “authorpreneur.” So what better week to give away Fauzia Burke’s Online Marketing for Busy Authors?
In 1995, Burke founded FSB Associates, which was one of the first companies to focus on digital branding and online book publicity. Since then, the company has taken part in launching more than 2,000 digital book campaigns. In Online Marketing for Busy Authors, she aims to both demystify and streamline the complicated world of digital book promotion.
We’re giving away a copy of Burke’s book to one lucky reader. Enter by 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 9th for your chance to win.
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B&N Still Searching For ‘Magic Bullet’ to Stop Sales Slide
A third-quarter financial performance which saw sales soften into the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, which ends in April, prompted Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio to discuss prospects for the future. For the third quarter ended January 28, total sales fell 8.0% from the third quarter of fiscal 2016, to $1.30 billion, and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) fell to $157.8 million from $169 million in last year’s third period. The weaker than expected results led the company to scale back projections for EBITDA for the full year to the $180 million–$190 million range and increase the projected decline in comparable store sales from 6% to 7%.
Responding to a question from an analyst in the conference call following the release of results, Riggio said that there is no question that B&N needs to keep EBITDA no lower than $180 million–$190 million to be a viable company. He said he thinks the company may be able to maintain that level for another two years through cost-cutting, but at some point that approach will “run out of gas. Our future is going to be determined by reversing the negative sales” trend, Riggio said. So far in fiscal 2017, B&N, including the Nook division, has lowered expenses by about $84 million, and Riggio said there are still ways to get more costs out of the company. But one thing B&N won’t do, he stressed, is save money by cutting store service; he emphasized B&N will “not take its important sales people off the floor.”
Riggio said that, while B&N has had good success with some new categories such as educational toys and games, it still hasn’t found a “magic bullet” that can end the overall sales slide. The company will continue to experiment with various types of boutiques and new lines of merchandise to grow sales, he said.
Riggio said the new test stores the company has opened over the last several months, which offer a fresh look at merchandising, design, and presentation, have done “very, very well.” B&N is in the process of undertaking a “dizzying amount of tests,” Riggio said, to see what facets of the new stores can be rolled out to other locations. He said B&N is “on the eve” of developing a new prototype store “that we think will carry us well into the future.” Once a prototype is identified, Riggio said, B&N may need to move some stores, something that the company “knows how to do.” He added that, with the rate of vacancies in malls, he sees plenty of opportunity to relocate stores within the same markets if necessary.
Riggio said he doesn’t see retail going away, even has he acknowledged that the growth of e-commerce had shifted retail shopping and demographic patterns. For B&N, sales of juvenile and young adult books and sales to senior citizens remain strong. And he said that, while the decline in retail has been a gradual trend, one factor behind the recent slide has been the continued obsession by the country, and the media, with the new Trump administration—business picked up at the beginning of the new year but fell again after the inauguration. B&N’s comp sales in the evening, when people are presumably staying home watching TV, are about 4% to 5% lower than during the day, Riggio said. In addition to keeping potential shoppers at home, the political coverage has “all but dried up” the exposure authors receive on television and in the newspapers, he said.
Looking back at the third quarter, B&N reported that comparable store sales fell 8.3%, driving a 7.5% decline in revenue through its retail segment. A bright spot was BN.com, where sales rose 2.2% in the quarter. Nook sales fell 25.7%.
For the first nine months of fiscal 2017, revenue at the chain was down 6.5%. Net income was $35.4 million, up from $6.2 million, but last year’s earnings included a $39.4 million loss from discontinued operations.
In a final note during the conference call, Riggio gave the impression that he was in no hurry to find a new CEO (he has been in that role since Ron Boire was fired last fall). “I’m happy doing what I’m doing,” he said. “I am all in with Barnes & Noble.” He added that newly appointed COO Demos Parneros has done a great job and needs to be considered a top candidate for the CEO job. Even when a new CEO is named, Riggio said, he will stay tied to the company and will remain chairman, at least for a while.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: B&N Still Searching For ‘Magic Bullet’ to Stop Sales Slide
The post B&N Still Searching For ‘Magic Bullet’ to Stop Sales Slide appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Who Should Star in the Barry Jenkins Adaptation of The Underground Railroad?
Great news: Barry Jenkins, director of newly-crowned Best Picture Moonlight, is reuniting with producers Plan B and Adele Romanski for a new project: a limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s bestselling, National Book Award-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. Talk about a gilded project. Seriously, I can think of no scenario in which this will not be amazing. The book follows two slaves who escape on a slightly-fabulist underground railroad—that is, a literal underground railroad—and try to make their way to actual freedom. It’s pretty much everyone’s favorite book of last year, so I can only hope that it makes the jump to the small screen quickly. But who will play the pivotal roles? Jenkins is obviously great at finding and elevating new talent, but just in case he wants a few suggestions, the Lit Hub office would support the below.
Cora: Amandla Stenberg
Amandla Stenberg is deeply badass, which is what an actor would have to be to have to portray the teenage runaway Cora, who is courageous and tenacious and aching for selfhood but rightly skeptical of the world that has been denying it to her all her life. “I wanted to explore how a character who knows only the tragedy of the plantation finds it in herself to take that first step,” Whitehead told Oprah of Cora. “And once you take that step, how do you keep going on a trip that will probably take years—if you aren’t caught or killed first—that might require you to wait for a full moon to guide you at night or to depend on a complete stranger not to betray you?” It would take something extraordinary, and I think Stenberg, whose first name means “strength,” would do her justice.
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Caesar: Alfred Enoch
The young man who first recruits Cora to run away with him is a sort of sage, who “carried himself as one beyond his years, like one of those wise old hands who tell you a story whose true message you only understand days or weeks later, when their facts are impossible to avoid.” Whitehead writes: “His body was lean and strong, like any field hand his age, but he carried his strength lightly. His face was round, with a flat button nose—she had a quick memory of dimples when he laughed.” Okay, so Enoch’s face isn’t remotely round, but those dimples could stick in anyone’s mind, and maybe even convince someone to risk everything…
Lovey: Quvenzhané Wallis
Cora’s young friend on the Randall farm is an “uncomplicated” and fun-loving girl, “the first to tell the fiddler to get busy and the first to dance.” We already know what a great actress Wallis is, so she should have no trouble playing the life of the party as well as the runaway/stowaway she becomes.
James Randall: Walton Goggins
James is the better, more dignified of the Randall brothers, who own the plantation where Cora, Caesar and Lovey live at the start of the book, but he’s still a hard man, a slave owner who is “stout as a barrel and just as firm in countenance.” Goggins is one of those beloved character actors who could elevate the role, and make him even scarier than he is in the book.
Terrance Randall: Michael Fassbender
Terrance is much eviler than his brother (as far as these things go), leering at his James’s female slaves and raping his own. “Terrance took after the father,” Whitehead writes, “tall and owl-faced, perpetually on the verge of swooping down on prey.” Look, I’m not trying to typecast Fassbender here or anything, but he was just so good (read: terrible and horrifying) in 12 Years a Slave that I don’t feel the least bit bad as casting him as the terrible and horrifying Terrance.
Martin Wells: William H. Macy
Wells is described as “a barrel-shaped man deep in his middle age, pasty-complected and soft. For an agent of the underground railroad, presumably no stranger to peril and risk, he evinced a nervous personality.” The “round red face” and “sweaty gray hair” can happen in makeup—what’s really good about Macy for this role is his definite ability to play the kind, well-intentioned, but highly-nervous bumbler.
Ethel Wells: Isabelle Huppert
Ethel is introduced this way: “A tall white woman in her nightclothes leaned against the wainscoting in the kitchen. She sipped a glass of lemonade and did not look at Cora as she said, “You’re going to get us murdered.” She has long gray hair that reaches “halfway down her back.” The actress has to be fearsome and brittle at the same time—a person who is doing the right thing at her own peril, but not the least bit happy about it. “The woman’s manner of walking unnerved Cora—she seemed to float, aloft on her fury,” Whitehead writes. I think Isabelle Huppert could pull this off with aplomb—and some hair dye.
Ridgeway: Tom Hardy
“Ridgeway was six and a half feet tall, with the square face and thick neck of a hammer. He maintained a serene comportment at all times but generated a threatening atmosphere, like a thunderhead that seems far away but then is suddenly overhead with a loud violence.” I mean, I really can’t think of anyone better to play this larger-than-life, monstrous, grudge-holding, slave-hunting Javert better than Tom Hardy.
Homer: Miles Brown
“The driver of the wagon was an odd little imp. Ten years old, Chester’s age, but imbued with the melancholy grace of an elderly house slave, the sum of practiced gestures. He was fastidious about his fine black suit and stovepipe hat, extracting lint from the fabric and glaring at it as if it were a poison spider before flicking it.” Homer is a strange and compelling character: a young black boy who is loyal to a slave catcher and seems to be imbued with an almost otherworldly presence. “Homer’s shining eyes, set in his round pudgy face,” Whitehead writes, “were at once feral and serene.” It’s super hard to cast a ten-year-old, of course. After all, they’re only one growth-spurt away from looking too old for the role, but if filming were to happen today, I think black-ish‘s Miles Brown could do a great job—after all, his physical control (he’s also an expert dancer) would be particularly helpful in portraying this character. Plus he’s like, really adorable, which would make him way creepier.
Royal: Chadwick Boseman
Cora’s love interest is a very dashing freeman and abolitionist, whose “wire spectacles reflected the lantern’s glow, as if the flame burned inside him.” I desperately want to see Mahershala Ali in wire spectacles, but I think he’s a little old for the part. Luckily, Chadwick Boseman isn’t—and he’s certainly someone whose silhouette would have girls swooning. Plus, he’s the Black Panther, so we already know he can play the hero.
The post Who Should Star in the Barry Jenkins Adaptation of The Underground Railroad? appeared first on Art of Conversation.
