Roy Miller's Blog, page 271
February 16, 2017
Christopher Kimball Returns to Cookbook Publishing
Christopher Kimball’s new multimedia company, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, will begin publishing cookbooks this fall. The cofounder of America’s Test Kitchen launched Milk Street last May after having a very public falling out with ATK’s board in November 2015.
Many of the elements of Kimball’s new company are similar to those of ATK. Milk Street has an eponymous cooking school and radio show distributed by PRX, a public television program that will air this fall, and a quarterly magazine that will publish its second issue in early March. But Kimball’s new venture, located at 177 Milk Street near Boston’s waterfront, has a much more international flavor than ATK.
At ATK, Kimball was part of an empire devoted to American cooking, which developed each recipe by cooking the dish in question 50 times to come up with the best method. By contrast, Milk Street is about putting dinner on the table, which Kimball believes is what every home cook wants, whether he or she is located in the U.S., China, or Mexico.
Milk Street is really about “translation or adaptation,” Kimball explained. “American cooking for the most part has been Northern European cooking. The world’s much bigger. How you cook, how you think about cooking is different.” Something a person at one of the Milk Street cooking classes said resonated with him: “I really like cooking; I’m always a beginner.” Kimball added, “That’s what we all are.” He has begun traveling the world in search of new dishes, from Chinese white-cooked chicken with ginger-soy dressing to French carrot salad.
Kimball began shopping a proposal for Milk Street’s first book last May, and The Milk Street Cookbook will be released in September. The 125-recipe book will serve as a companion to the Milk Street television series and includes 40 recipes from the inaugural 13-episode season. In many respects it will also serve as the flagship for the company’s book program. Kimball plans to do less than five titles per year at first, and for now he prefers to work with a publisher, even though he handled publishing at ATK.
The winning bidder for The Milk Street Cookbook was Michael Szczerban, editorial director at Little, Brown, who signed Kimball for a two-book deal. Szczerban said that as soon as he heard that Kimball was leaving ATK, he knew he wanted to be part of his next venture. Kimball has a history with Little, Brown—it reissued two of his earlier cookbooks in 2015, The Cook’s Bible (originally released in 1996) and The Dessert Bible (2000)—and Szczerban regards him as “a genius.”
By signing Kimball, Szczerban said, “I really believe that we’re building the next juggernaut of American cooking.” He added: “From a publishing perspective these could be transformative for Little, Brown’s cookbook program. We don’t do that many—six to eight a year. So you can expect pretty robust publishing plans.”
Given the interest in the inaugural issue of Kimball’s Milk Street magazine, Szczerban could be on to something. Milk Street had more than 300,000 requests for the charter issue, mostly through Facebook. The charter issue was free with a subscription for six more issues. For the second issue, Milk Street has 100,000 paid readers.
A version of this article appeared in the 01/30/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Kimball Returns to Cookbook Publishing
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Lit Hub Daily: February 16, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1992, Angela Carter, English novelist and short story writer, dies.
xxx. | Literary Hub
How bookstores are helping to mobilize resistance against Trump. | The New York Times
“I do think that relationships function because we play roles.” An interview with Katie Kitamura. | Jezebel
Krysten Ritter—of Breaking Bad and Jessica Jones fame—has sold her debut novel, a psychological thriller entitled Bonfire, to Crown Archetype. | Entertainment Weekly
What does it mean to invoke Beyoncé? Morgan Parker on academia, black womanhood, and her new poetry collection. | NYLON
On nights like this, gravity had no power over Edgar: short fiction by Victor Lodato. | Granta
An infographic of U.S. Poet Laureates (and the presidents they served under), from Joseph Auslander to Juan Felipe Herrera. | My Poetic Side
“You’ve got to let yourself write freely, with a lot of joy and conviction.” George Saunders on his favorite passage in literature, from Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” | The Atlantic
And on Literary Hub: xxx • xxx • xxx
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Indie Booksellers, Want to Go to the Turin Book Fair for Free?
Europa Editions and Other Press are taking three independent booksellers to the Turin International Book Fair.
Last year, Europa sent bookseller Ariana Paliobagis from Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Mont. to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, the publisher is collaborating with Other Press to send three independent booksellers to the Turin International Book Fair (May 18-22).
“We think it is a great way to give booksellers the opportunity to experience a foreign book fair first-hand, to take in the culture and, hopefully, reinforce their commitment to selling literature in translation and from abroad,” Sophia Franchi, coordinator of the program, told PW.
Dubbed the International Bookfair Scholarship (IBS), the program — which is also being run in partnership with Europa’s Italian publishing partner Edizioni E/O — will cover all expenses associated with attending the Turin Book Fair. In addition, the booksellers will be invited to participate in panels, networking, and curate a part of a 345 sq.-ft. pop-up “American style independent bookstore” that will be part of the show floor. “We’ll have Europa and Other books for sale,” said Franchi, “and the booksellers will be invited to put their own mark on the store as well.”
Scholarship recipients will be chosen based on applicants supporting statements about their interest in selling and engaging with international literature and the ideas they have for bringing international literature to the attention of more readers.
Applications are being accepted until March 1 and can be made by visiting www.internationalbookfairscholarship.com.
According to Franchi, more than 50 booksellers have applied so far.
This article has been updated.
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Gone Guy: A Writer Leaves His Wife, Then Disappears in Greece
Christopher is a rich, clever, charming Englishman, the author of a much-praised social history of music. For years since its publication, he has talked about writing a second book, this time about worldwide rituals of mourning, a subject that has recently seemed to grip him with a new urgency. “It was a strange project for a man who had hitherto lost nothing of significance,” his wife reflects. “Not even a pet dog, a man who had no conception of what real loss must feel like.” His mother has tracked Christopher down to the southern Peloponnese, where he has evidently gone to research the “weepers,” professional mourners who are still, according to local tradition, paid to ululate at funerals. “You know how powerful my intuition is,” his mother persists. “I know something is wrong, it’s not like him not to return my calls.”
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The narrator doesn’t share her mother-in-law’s concern. Her husband, she’s discovered, is a compulsive philanderer, and she has finally gotten sick of his infidelities, his fakeries. But because of her own deception-by-omission, her inability to say that she and her husband are separated, the young woman finds herself agreeing to fly to Greece to track him down in the out-of-season beach resort where he has apparently been holed up for the last few weeks. It’s a long way to travel and she’s never had any desire to see Greece, but, she tells herself, “I supposed it would be my last dutiful act” as a daughter-in-law. When she and Christopher come face-to-face, she intends to ask him for a divorce.
Kitamura’s previous novel, “Gone to the Forest,” was set during a colonial revolt in a nameless country in an undefined era. The geographical setting of “A Separation” is Google Maps specific: The book’s action unfolds in the fishing village of Gerolimenas on the Mani Peninsula. Yet the same austere indeterminacy, the same allegorical quality that haunted Kitamura’s earlier fiction is also at work here. In “Gone to the Forest,” the unspecified country was devastated by a volcanic eruption that smothered the land in “a blizzard of ash.” “A Separation” features forest fires that have similarly reduced the countryside to “mounds of burnt charcoal, a lunar landscape” that emits a stench “so heavy you could barely breathe.” While the earlier narrative took place on a white landowner’s farm, worked and surrounded by “natives,” “A Separation” depicts a postcolonial form of colonialism: a luxury resort planted in a poor traditional society that’s been devastated by the Great Recession, a resort in which the only interaction of the guests with their host culture is service-based, and where, as the narrator soon discovers, a taxi driver or receptionist’s efforts at human kindness are regarded by their “bigoted” clientele merely as efforts to extract more money from them.
Much as the narrator might like to remove the strictures of these power relations and escape into something more spontaneous, she’s trapped by her own inability to trust the people around her. Oddly, the most emotionally charged scene in the novel occurs when, having invited the young hotel receptionist (with whom she suspects Christopher has had a flirtation) to dinner, the narrator dissolves into seething resentment when her guest orders the most ostentatiously expensive items on the menu. Fuming, she watches as the other woman “sucked the meat out of the lobster’s claw, her chin growing slick with butter,” then devours her steak with a “carnal satisfaction.” “Of course,” the narrator recognizes, “I knew even then that it wasn’t her order or the meal that I was going to pay for. This was all just a cipher for another infraction.”
Lots of things in “A Separation” are just ciphers for other infractions, other codes that the novel’s “outsiders” — its narrator included — have unwittingly violated. In the hierarchical world of Kitamura’s novel, there is little love or friendship between equals, only manipulation and control, guilt and obedience, humiliation and submission. And behind these power games, one detects an overriding fatalism about the possibility of human connection, a sense that “wife and husband and marriage are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than perhaps can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing.”
It is this radical disbelief — a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art — that makes Kitamura’s accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work.
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Russians in the Whitehouse? Blackmail, Disinformation, and Michael Flynn
Vladimir Putin joined the KGB in 1975 near the end of the Cold War, a 23-year-old from Saint Petersburg whose mother was a factory worker, father briefly a member of the NKVD, precursor to the KGB. He moved into politics when the collapse of the Berlin Wall altered the career prospects of an ambitious man facing a world being shaped by Détente. But the organization of his mind and his worldview were shaped by his years in the KGB, and particularly his time in the Second Chief Directorate—counter-intelligence. The Second Chief Directorate mastered the use of kompromat—the use of compromising material to blackmail agents of the West.
Blackmail Target was the phrase cited by the Department of Justice when it offered the White House evidence contradicting National Security Advisor Michel Flynn’s denials about the nature of his conversations with his Russian security counterparts. Flynn, as we all know, resigned. Blackmail is only one of the coercive techniques used by the Russians to undermine American national security. Some of the other techniques can be more complex, less straight forward, and more stubborn to identify—making them more dangerous. If Flynn had not been so bungling in his behavior he might still be in place and continue to pose a threat—even unintentionally.
Consider this hypothetical from Allen Dulles, CIA Director of Intelligence, 1950-1961: a Soviet diplomat in a cocktail conversation with an American counterpart inadvertently drops a causal comment on an important topic, having been directed to do so by Moscow Center, and the American, intrigued by the comment he isn’t supposed to have heard, makes note, and he becomes an unwitting messenger of misinformation to the White House. A similar comment is made by another Soviet diplomat at another cocktail conversation a thousand miles away and reported by a second American, so when the two connect in the White House they seem to confirm each other. This planted disinformation is subtle, its chance nature enhancing its likely truth, and its operates inside the White House to manipulate Presidential thinking. Flynn would not have to have been blackmailed to have posed an intelligence threat. He simply would have to be careless and ambitious—traits that by all reports he has in abundance.
Within the CIA there are strict security protocols to vet information that comes in over the transom to evaluate it for its potential for disinformation. Other security protocols apply to intelligence officers to periodically evaluate their trustworthiness. High ranking White House Advisors aren’t subject to the polygraphs tests, and their information isn’t necessarily vetted extensively before it is whispered into the ear of the President—conveying unintentionally the disinformation that serves the Soviet’s interests.
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When a CIA case officer is caught in a lie about his conversation with a KGB counterpart there is an investigation into the lie and an examination into the possibility the officer is a Soviet mole. Why did he lie? What was he hiding?
Michael Flynn’s lie about his conversation with his Soviet contact should be viewed with the same high stakes. The challenge of an investigation into an officer who has lied, is to know, if it is possible to do so, whether anything he says, or has said, can be believed. The process of textual exegesis is complex, demanding, and careers rarely recover.
Putin knows all this. His 16 years in the KGB allowed to him observe, and perform, the art of deception as an offensive weapon—and to recognize its use against Russia.
The CIA has been concerned with America’s vulnerability to Soviet disinformation since its formation in 1948. Richard Helms, who later became Director of Central Intelligence, went before Congress in 1961 and offered 32 examples of dangerous disinformation perpetrated by the Soviet Union. In 1977, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA Technical Services Division and head of the agency’s MKULTRA program, testified before the Senate that there was concern that the Soviets had sequestered members of the Presidential party traveling overseas, and administered mind altering hallucinogens. This was the Manchurian Candidate scenario, applied not to the President, but to the members of his staff traveling with him.
Allen Dulles cited in his autobiography what he called the most famous case of high level penetration of an intelligence service. Alfred Redl was chief of counterintelligence in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Military Intelligence Service. From 1902 to 1913, when he was caught, Ridl was a secret agent for the Russians, having been trapped early in his career by his weakness of young men and money. Ridl was a member of the General Staff and he had access to the General Staff’s war plans, which he gave to the Russians. He was arrested just before the war broke out. To keep his scandalous treason quiet, he superior officers “invited” him to take his own life.
Dulles found himself in the same position in 1953. James Speyer Kronthal, Yale graduate, art collector, and Dulles’s protégé from their time together in the CIA’s Bern Station, was outed as a double agent—a Soviet spy in the CIA’s inner circle. The Soviets had turned Kronthal when they discovered Hermann Goering’s wartime records of Kronthal’s compromising behavior, confronted him, and said, “Now you work for us.” Dulles, a keen student of history, “invited” Kronthal to keep his family’s honor and over dinner handed him a vial of CIA’s poison. Kronthal was found dead the next morning by his long time house keeper in the upstairs bedroom of his Georgetown home.
Putin is a trained KGB officer. The goal of good field officers is to spread disinformation, undermine the opposition, and seek advantage—the history of tradecraft practice and the evidence in news reports, suggest, even if Flynn was unaware, that he was being set up by the Russians. The goal of the spy, and the spy novelist, are the same: inhabit the mind of the opposition unsentimentally, without the crippling vanity of naiveté, and imagine the worst.
Paul Vidich is the author of An Honorable Man and his forthcoming thriller, The Good Assassin, will be available in April.
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February 15, 2017
Bookstore Sales Rose 2.5% in 2016
Despite some softness late in the year, bookstore sales in 2016 rose 2.5% over 2015, according to preliminary estimates released Wednesday morning by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Store revenue reached just under $12 billion last year compared to $11.68 billion in 2015. The increase marks the second consecutive year that bookstore sales have increased after seven years of decline.
The increase for the year came despite a 3.1% drop in bookstore sales in December 2016 compared to December 2015. Sales in the last month of 2016 were $1.41 billion, down from $1.45 billion. The improvement also occurred in a book environment that, with the exception of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, had no real huge hits.
Sales for the entire retail segment increased 3.2% in 2016, with a 4.6% sales gain in December.
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Philip Pullman to Release First Volume in New ‘Book of Dust’ Trilogy
The author Philip Pullman in Oxford, England, last month.
Credit
Michael Leckie/Penguin Random House, via Associated Press
The novelist Philip Pullman, known for his wildly popular fantasy series “His Dark Materials,” will release the first book in a new trilogy in October, he told the BBC on Wednesday.
The first volume in the new series, called “The Book of Dust,” is to be released in the United States and Britain on Oct. 19. The name of the first volume has not been announced.
“At the center of ‘The Book of Dust’ is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organization, which wants to stifle speculation and inquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free,” Mr. Pullman said in an earlier statement. The new books will focus on Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of “His Dark Materials,” who is trying to discover the secrets of “dust,” a cosmic force whose powers are a subject of recurring mystery in the first series.
The “His Dark Materials” trilogy, released from 1995 to 2000, consists of “The Golden Compass” (published as “Northern Lights” in Britain), “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass.”
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The series centers on the coming-of-age of Lyra and Will Parry, heroes with intertwined fates who take on epic quests in fantasy universes, often battling with members of a sinister organization called the Church.
The books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold around 18 million copies worldwide. “The Golden Compass” was adapted into a 2007 movie starring Nicole Kidman, after a difficult development process.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4 that aired on Wednesday, Mr. Pullman referred to the new books as an “equel” to the first trilogy, distinguishing it from a prequel or a sequel, and noting that the book “doesn’t stand before or after ‘His Dark Materials,’ but beside it.” He also said that the new books would take place 10 years before the start of “His Dark Materials,” and end roughly 10 years after the end of it.
“The story about Lyra that we read in ‘His Dark Materials’ is finished; that story came to its conclusion,” Mr. Pullman told the BBC. “But there are other stories that can be told about the people in the book and the world of the book, and one of them has been occupying my imagination for quite some time.”
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Jim Parker, Ingram Senior Executive V-P, Dies at 77
James C. “Jim” Parker, a longtime Ingram Book Company employee who retired in 2002 as senior executive vice president, died of cancer on February 12 in Columbia, Tenn. He was 77.
After graduating from the University of Alabama, Parker served a stint as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army before beginning a brief career in academia. In 1974, Parker began to work for Ingram Industries in Nashville as a warehouse worker; by his retirement in 2002, he had been named a senior executive v-p at the company. Parker's work at the company included assisting in the development of books on tape and audiobooks.
Parker is survived by his wife, Carese; his children Stewart and Andrew; daughters-in-law Sara and Kristin; and others including siblings and grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on Thursday, February 16, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. at First United Methodist Church in Columbia, Tenn. Military honors will be provided by the United States Army Honor Guard.
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Emotion vs. Feeling: How to Evoke More From Readers
The difference between writing emotion and writing feeling is more one of degree than kind. Feeling is emotion that has been habituated and refined; it is understood and can be used deliberately. I know how I feel about this person and treat her accordingly. Emotion is more raw, unconsidered. It comes to us unbidden, regardless of how familiar it might be. Rage is an emotion. Contempt is a feeling.
Both emotion and feeling are essential not only in fiction but in nonfiction. However, given their unique qualities, rendering them on the page requires different techniques.
Both rely upon understanding what readers want. People don’t turn to stories to experience what you, the writer, have experienced—or even what your characters have. They read to have their own experience. Our job is to create a series of effects to facilitate and enhance that experience.
This guest post is by David Corbett, who is the award-winning author of five novels, the story collection Killing Yourself to Survive and the nonfiction work, The Art of Character. David is a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest. He resides in Northern California with his wife and their Wheaten terrier. Find him online at davidcorbett.com.
Follow him on Twitter @DavidCorbett_CA.
Eliciting Emotion
Emotion on the page is created through action and relies on surprise for its effect. That surprise is ultimately generated by having the character express or exhibit an emotion not immediately apparent in the scene.
We all experience multiple emotions in any given situation. So, too, our characters. To create genuine emotion when crafting a scene, identify the most likely or obvious response your character might have, then ask: What other emotion might she be experiencing? Then ask it again—reach a “third-level emotion.” Have the character express or exhibit that. Through this use of the unexpected, the reader will experience a greater range of emotion, making the scene more vivid.
Surprise can also be generated through unforeseen reveals and/or reversals. This technique requires misdirection: creating a credible expectation that something other than what occurs will happen instead.
Types of misdirection include:
Misdirection through ambiguity: Any of several results might occur.
Misdirection through fallacy: Something creates a mistaken belief regarding what is happening or what it means.
Misdirection through sympathy: Intense focus on one character lures the reader into overlooking what another might do.
To ground a surprise in emotion you must develop a belief that some other emotional outcome—ideally, the opposite of the one you hope to evoke—is not only possible, but likely.
For example, to push the readers toward dread, panic or terror, you need to create the impression that these emotions are in no way inevitable. The readers are trying to avoid the negative feeling. It’s hope that “the terrible thing” can be circumvented that makes them feel the dread, panic or terror once it’s presented, and actually intensifies it.
Exploring Feeling
Feeling requires introspection, which thus necessitates identification with the character and empathy for what she faces.
Remember, however, that the story’s action and its characters are vehicles through which the reader creates her own emotional experience. The goal is not to get readers to feel what the characters feel, per se, but to use the characters as a device to get readers to feel something on their own.
Recent neurological research suggests that feeling and cognition coincide, which is to say that a major factor in experiencing a feeling is the assessment of it. This means that, despite the modernist turn toward the objective mode (Hemingway, Hammett, etc.), and the constant drumbeat of “show, don’t tell,” readers need some processing of feeling to register it meaningfully.
This means allowing characters to think about what they’re feeling, which accomplishes two things:
It makes the feelings both more concrete and more personal.
It creates time and space for readers to process their own feelings. If empathy for the character has been forged, this allows readers to ask themselves: Do I feel the same way? Do I feel differently?
Such examination is best accomplished in sequel scenes, which normally occur after a particularly dramatic scene or a series of these scenes that culminate in a devastating reveal or reversal. These scenes permit characters and readers alike to take a breather and process what has just happened.
[11 Reasons Writing is Good for Your Health]
Within such scenes, the point-of-view character:
registers and analyzes the emotional impact of what has happened
thinks through the logical import or meaning of what has happened
makes a plan for how to proceed.
Readers process their own emotions and interpretation of events while the character is doing so, not necessarily in parallel or even consciously.
It’s typically best to keep this sort of analysis brief. Going on too long can bore or alienate readers who have already ingested and interpreted what’s happened and are ready to move on. Try to restrict yourself to a paragraph or two. The point isn’t to overanalyze the character’s feelings, but to clear a space for readers to examine their own.
To accomplish this, the POV character should:
Dig deeper: As with emotion, surprise is a key element. You need a starting point that seems unexpected, because nothing shuts off the reader like belaboring the obvious. Instead, seek a second- or third-level feeling in the scene.
Objectify the feeling: Find a physical analogy for it (e.g. She felt as though her shame had created a sunburn from within).
Compare the feeling: Measure it against other occasions when it has arisen. Is it worse this time? How? Why?
Evaluate the feeling: Is it right or wrong to feel this way? Proper or shameful? What would a more refined, stronger, wiser person feel?
Justify the feeling: Explore why this feeling is the only honest response for the character.
Examine the impact on identity: What does this feeling say about the character or the state of her life? Has she grown or regressed? Does she recognize the feeling as universal, or does it render her painfully alone?
[10 Habits of Highly Effective Writers]
Putting Them Together: Writing Emotion and Feeling
A character changes through the emotions she experiences, the refinement of those emotions into feelings, and the evolution in self-awareness that this process allows. This gradual metamorphosis creates the story’s internal arc, providing the character an opportunity to move step-by-step from being at the mercy of her emotions to mastering her feelings. And through the use of surprise and introspection, you provide a means for the reader to traverse an arc of her own, expanding her emotional self-awareness.
The author wishes to thank writer and agent Donald Maass for his invaluable insights on these matters.
You’ll appreciate this book if:
You want to know how to write a novel with artfully crafted character
You need help choosing point of view, developing dialogue and bringing characters to life
You’re interested in weaving in antagonists and second characters into your story
You want value by getting 40 chapters and eight sections on creating characters in novels and short stories.
Order Creating Characters here.
You might also like:
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Aunt Fire
Mommy and I are burning,
nobody knows what its like for us:
for all of you the world
is like an egg,
for us it is like an inside out egg.
Your anger or grief resolves into a shell
around the shifting, ill-fitting yolk of the love in your soul.
For mommy and me, there is a hard-cored fire
pluming with a toxic yolk
that we insist you eat.
Eat it, it is our love, we say. It is our love, we say, eat it.
To turn down the yolk is to turn down the shell that produced it.
Swallow our shells.
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