Omnivoracious

Amazon Exclusive: A Review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El Juego del Ángel (Angel's Game)

      
   (The cover of the Spanish edition and the author.)

This week marks the official release of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's El Juego del Ángel in the United States. It's a follow-up to his international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind. As Amazon reported back in March, the novel had the highest initial printing for any novel published in Spain.

The catch? For now, it's only available in the author's native tongue, Spanish. With an English-language version just barely on the horizon, we turned to Larry Nolen to write a review based on his reading of an advance copy of the Spanish edition. Nolen divides his time between being an English and History teacher, engaging in amateur translations of Latin American authors, and operating a blog devoted to literature--a blog that was one of the first to provide any information about El Juego del Ángel in either language in the months leading up to its publication. Nolen, with both the review and the translation of two paragraphs from the novel, give us limited creatures who don't read Spanish a tantalizing glimpse of the rich treasures to come. Visit Nolen's blog for English translations of two recent interviews with the author.

James Owen's Search for the Red Dragon

Some multi-talented creators can write books and produce cover art for them. That's the case with James Owen and his Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographic series for young adults. The second book, The Search for the Red Dragon, was released this year. It's a gorgeous book in addition to a thrilling adventure, in no small part due to Owen's marvelous illustrations and cover art. The sketches above showing the creation of that cover art come from a page on his website where he details the whole process. I've posted the finished cover below so you can see the full realization of his vision.

The Search for the Red Dragon has been getting great reviews, and I recommend you pick it up. Here's a little bit more about the book:

It has been nine years since John, Jack, and Charles had their great adventure in the Archipelago of Dreams and became the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica. Now they have been brought together again to solve a mystery: Someone is kidnapping the children of the Archipelago. And their only clue is a mysterious message delivered by a strange girl with artificial wings: "The Crusade has begun." Worse, they discover that all of the legendary Dragonships have disappeared as well. The only chance they have to save the world from a centuries-old plot is to seek out the last of the Dragonships -- the Red Dragon -- in a spectacular journey that takes them from Sir James Barrie's Kensington Gardens to the Underneath of the Greek Titans of myth.

 

1984 in 2008: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

This week marks the publication of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which as we reported here last month is a young adult novel that functions in part as a correction and update of such dystopic novels as 1984 and Brave New World. Except here the hero is Marcus, a smart seventeen year old caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Picked up by homeland security, interrogated brutally, and then released, Marcus finds himself in a world where fear rules and every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. Marcus has a choice to make--and he decides to fight back. Doctorow has wedded his fascination with cutting-edge technology and the choices we make about technology to a riveting suspense plot in this potentially controversial novel.

Reviews and previews are all over the internet, of course. Ed Park in the LA Times writes that Doctorow is "terrific at finding the human aura shimmering around technology." SFF World believes the novel will "only further reinforce Cory Doctorow’s presence as one of the visionaries of free speech advocacy and great storytelling in the twenty-first century." Strange Horizons comments on the distinction Doctorow draws between privacy versus security: "Doctorow offers a distinction between the two which I am still pondering. He suggests that privacy is individual, with no implications of power over anyone else. Secrecy, in emulation of the old formula ('power + prejudice = racism') can then be framed as power + privacy = secrecy. Secrecy is what you do to others; it is withholding information or demanding access to another's privacy, or demanding of others that they keep 'private' something you have done to them."

A Publishers Weekly feature that ran in January suggested that "Time will tell if the book’s political awareness and tech-savvy will resonate with readers (teen or otherwise), but [Patrick] Nielsen-Hayden [Doctorow's editor] hopes that it will inspire them to become more active and involved. 'It’s not a call for anarchy in the streets,' he says, 'but it is a call for a more reasonable social order.'" Nielsen-Hayden shares more thoughts about Little Brother on the Making Light blog.

Doctorow also talks generally about SF and young readers at the website for a new YA anthology, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Tonight he's in Toronto to kick off his book tour. Check out the reviews and check out the novel--you'll be glad you did.

Pop Culture Report #3: James and Kathryn Morrow's European SF Anthology

Earlier this month, Tor Books released the trade paperback edition of James and Kathryn Morrow's The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of sixteen stories translated from a variety of European countries. Contributors include Jean-Claude Dunyach, Panagiotis Koustas, Joao Barreiros, Andreas Eschbach, and many more. Most of these writers are well-known in their own countries but have had very little work translated into English. Our Pop Culture Report #3 (above) gives you more information on this intriguing, some would say essential, anthology. I conducted the interviews with the editors and Greek contributor Koustas in Nantes, France, last year, at Utopiales, a wonderful speculative fiction festival.

From Publishers Weekly's starred review: Wondrous worlds await U.S. SF fans in this sensitively chosen, impeccably translated anthology of Continental European science fiction stories, ranging from 1987 to 2005. Offering "emotional satisfaction and cerebral excitement," as James Morrow puts it in his introduction, highlights include Johanna Sinisalo's "Baby Doll," a Finnish denunciation of materialistic exploitation of children; Romanian Lucian Merisca's "Some Earthlings' Adventures on Outrerria," an excruciating political satire; Valerio Angelisti's "Sepultura," which offers a neo-Dantean Infernoscape; and W.J. Maryson's "Verstummte Musik," a Dutch near-future Orwellian nightmare. A French twist on human-machine interface lifts Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Separations" into a meditation on the nature of artistic creativity, while Elena Arsenieva's "A Birch Tree, a White Fox" exquisitely illustrates the quintessential Russian soul. These "disciplined speculations" by European writers and their painstaking translators not only excite the mind, they move the heart.

Book-Beer Pairings (Part II)--T.C. Boyle, Chip Kidd, Margo Lanagan, James Morrow, and More

     
(Large beer Drayman's Porter with Small Beer's Ant King; Dudman's novel and Old Speckled Hen.)

Much has happened since posting Part I of the book-beer pairings feature. First, I tested out Three Philosophers with Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton and found that (1) it is indeed a great Belgian-style beer, with some very subtle yet strong flavors, and (2) it goes very well with Groff's book.

Then, I decided to check in with Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press because...well, how can you do this kind of feature and not talk to a publisher called Small Beer Press? Gavin has a lot of respect for both books and beer--and access to both locally. “We have a fantastic brewery (ok, we have a few) in the Happy Valley in Massachusetts: the Berkshire Brewing Company. Their Traditional Pale Ale is a summer time treat and all winter we survive on their Drayman's Porter. Which is what we were drinking when the UPS guy delivered galleys of our next collection, Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King.” (You can now download John Kessel’s excellent new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Maureen F. McHugh's powerful Mothers & Other Monsters from the Small Beer website.)

So, without further rabbiting, the continuation of this landmark feature...

Guinness Versus Everything Else?!

Although most participants in the second half of this feature preferred matching a dark beer with their books, a few hold-outs for lighter imbibification include Thomas Disch, Nick Mamatas, and Chip Kidd—Kidd mostly because, as a purist, he deferred to his novel: “In The Learners, Happy and Himillsy down Rolling Rocks at Modern Apizz in New Haven, so that would appropriate. Otherwise, everyone drinks martinis.”

Mamatas probably wouldn’t typify his pick as a light beer, although it is: “The official beer of Weinbergia, the country in Under My Roof, is Red Stripe.  Short and hip, sweet and a bit more dangerous than you might at first suspect.  Plus, hipsters dig it like they dig uncombed hair and T-shirts from 1985.”

Similarly, Disch, author of the forthcoming The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten (coming July 1 from Tachyon Publications), selected either Rhinegold or Lowenbrau for his forthcoming farcical “memoir”: “In the New York of my youth (I was 17 when I got here in '57, and Miss Rhinegold was then an annual tradition. The contestants had their pictures posted in the subways. There was also a Miss Subways. They have both disappeared in our new, unsexed era, but there is another good reason to serve Rhinegold at the book party. It is the beer Wagner made famous. Not much of a beer in itself, as I recall, which is why it may have become extinct, and not the best opera in the Ring either, but no one has ever dared to bring out a beer called Gotterdammerung....I was actually in Lowenbrau Hofbrauhaus in Munich (in 1966). There were tiers of drinking halls where roisterers bellowed out drinking songs. A kind of Valhalla.”

Bothering the Coffee Drinkers: The Multi-Talented Doug Hoekstra

         

Doug Hoekstra has quietly become an icon of Americana music and the Nashville scene, writing beautifully spare songs that contain genius-level observations about people. As Wired magazine has said about Hoekstra "a lot of people write songs, Hoekstra writes five-minute worlds." So it comes as no surprise that Hoekstra also writes fiction and nonfiction, collected in Bothering the Coffee Drinkers, which won an Independent Publishing Book Award.

The book is just as fascinating as Hoekstra's music. I really can't put it any better than the Midwest Book Review: "Each detail segues compactly into the next and before you know it, the book has hooked you in a distinctly quirky and entertaining way. Like all great music, it sounds easy to do. As all great musicians know, this is a deceptive effect that is only maintained through constant work and practice. [Hoekstra] is like a quirky art collector, putting together odd bits and ends, and then making them into something with an effect so much more than the mere sum of their collective oddities."

Hoekstra has just released a CD, Blooming Roses, which consists of another eleven perfectly understated songs that incorporate elements of country, rock, and even jazz. From the easy-going "Naper Vegas Scrabble Club" to the quirky/driving "Your Sweet Love," Hoekstra has crafted some great new songs. I interviewed Hoekstra recently to talk about both writing and music.

What's the Fuss About Patrick Rothfuss?

   

Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, recently released in mass market paperback, is an Amazon staff favorite--and, really, what's not to like? Rothfuss doesn't write down to his audience, takes on epic themes, and manages to be original at the same time. He's also a down-to-earth, no-nonsense kind of guy, as evidenced by this new interview on SF Site, which fans should definitely check out. For example, asked about working on The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss says, "For more than a decade I worked on the book knowing I was more likely to be hit by a bus than get published...I do remember that fairly early on someone pointed out that I used the word 'alloy' and 'counterpoint' in the same sentence. That person pointed out that some people wouldn't actually know what an alloy was. I made a conscious decision right then that my book was written for people who either knew what that word meant, or were willing to look it up."  That's the kind of attitude that, perversely enough, more often than not produces great novels.

The next book in the trilogy is due out next year.

Junot Diaz, You've Just Won the Pulitzer... What Are You Going to Do Now?

Last summer, after turning over the last page of my advance galley of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was floored by what I had just read and used any gathering of two or more people to announce to the world that it was my favorite novel of 2007. "You mean, so far?" No, the year. I was going all-in, even with a whole fall season of unread books in front of me.

So you can imagine how over-the-moon happy I was for Diaz last Monday when I heard that he'd won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When I asked his editor, Sean McDonald, if he could help us get a few post-Pulitzer questions into Junot's inbox, I didn't expect Diaz would actually have the time to deliver (he'd just won the Pulitzer, after all!). But deliver he did, and along with the answers, he threw us the ultimate surprise--the opening passage (or what he calls "throat clearing") from the seemingly post-apocalyptic new book he's working on. Does this mean there's a Hugo Award in his future? We shall see...

--BTP

Amazon.com: Junot, first of all, congratulations! You've been on quite a ride since Oscar Wao came out last fall. You were awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, topped countless Best of 2007 lists, and now the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Where were you when you found out you won the Pulitzer?

Diaz: I actually was in my mother's house in NJ. (Which, when you think about it, was where it all started for me, as an immigrant, as a young lover of books, in NJ.) The first call I could barely hear (my two-year-old nephew was having a bang-up time throwing his toys) so I went outside, out by the Hackensack River and called my agent, who hadn't yet gotten the official word. The real confirmation came ten minutes later. I was still on the bridge, freezing, and after a few minutes of stunned silence, just me and the traffic and the cattails, I walked home and gathered my mother and my sister and told them and I don't think I've ever seen them happier for me (though my mother did cry a little). My nephew was the best, he didn't give a damn about no Pulitzer, he just wanted me to chase him.

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

Amazon.com: And what's it like to share the Pulitzer spotlight with Bob Dylan, who was awarded an honorary special citation?

Diaz: I'm one book, he's a lifetime. It feels great to be in such company. Now if somebody could score my goddaughters some tickets, I'll be the coolest godfather ever.

Amazon.com: Do all the awards make the over-a-decade gap between books worth the wait?

Diaz: The only thing that makes anything worth it is another book that moves people. But hey, in the meantime, the awards certainly keep you warm, psychically! No denying that.

Amazon.com: Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2017 until the next book?

Diaz: If I was the only writer in the world this would be a problem but luckily we have tens of thousands of cool writers to take the weight off. No matter who you're waiting for to publish I recommend a strong course of Samuel R. Delany (start with Dark Reflections and then graduate to his magnum opus Dhalgren) and my favorite crazy woman Natsuo Kirino (Grotesque). Always something on the shelves to keep you busy.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a little tease of what you're working on next?

Diaz: Oh sure, why not, who knows when it will ever see the light of day again. This is some opening throat-clearing from my next novel Dark America.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck.  Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora.  See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.

Dora Lives

Pioneer. Felon. Genius. Con man.  These titles (and many more) have been draped on the shoulders of legendary surf icon Miki Dora for decades.   Yet very few ever got close enough to get a clear picture of who Dora really was.   Hitting bookshelves today, David Rensin's All for a Few Perfect Waves offers a rare and engaging look at the life and times of an elusive figure known famously as "Da Cat."  Armed with hundreds of interviews and meticulous research, Rensin tackles the man, the myth, and the legend of Miki Dora.

I recently chatted over email with Rensin about his pursuit of a man once dubbed "The Black Knight of Surfing."

Amazon.com: Miki has been compared to everyone from Jesus to James Dean. After reading All for a Few Perfect Waves, I found my own comparison: he was the Tyler Durden of surfing. Akin to the Fight Club character, surfers cannot always condone Dora’s antics, but we quietly support his pursuit for point-break perfection. Do you agree?
Rensin: I agree. Miki, like Durden, was that sage of harsh reality who made his own way, and the hell with the rest of you. Like Durden he was not completely a loner, and was willing to bring along new initiates if they attracted him with their own inner search. Often while writing the book, I kept thinking about Fight Club and how the rule never to talk about Fight Club was Miki’s rule for himself. Many of Durden’s aphorisms apply as well to Miki: "The things you own end up owning you." "It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything." And my favorite, "Fight Club exists only when Fight Club begins and when it ends." Or, as Miki famously said: "When there’s surf I’m totally committed. When there’s none, it doesn’t exist."

Book Preview: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Coming in May

(Author photo by Bart Nagel)

Author and Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow makes his YA debut in May with Little Brother, a novel Doctorow told Amazon is "enormously" influenced by dystopian/fascist regime classics. "The genre fascinates me; the novel 1984 is one of my favorite and most re-read. Adolescents are the perfect protagonists for these stories, too--hence Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Kindness."

In the novel, Doctorow's teenage protagonist, Marcus, finds himself caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, with civil liberties suspended and the Department of Homeland Security conducting merciless interrogations. "Marcus...is a smart-alecky, brainy kid who loves showing off what he knows (I was that kid)." Some of these same qualities lead Marcus to try to take down the DHS.

Little Brother comes with glowing praise from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfeld, and Brian K. Vaughn. And the publisher, Tor, has a novel approach to promotion: the book will be sent out to high school newspapers for review. Doctorow says this idea came from "the brilliant people at YPulse, which is probably the best site on the net about marketing and communications for young people. They were an enormous help in formulating the publicity strategy for the book."

Can't wait until May for Little Brother? Doctorow has released a podcast excerpt, which you can listen to here.

Toby Barlow's Poetic Responses About Sharp Teeth

                         

Toby Barlow has converted many with Sharp Teeth, his "werewolf" novel in poem form, published in January. It's been getting great reviews and I can report happily that, despite not being fond of either werewolves or long poems, the result is not only delightful but exciting, intense, oddly tender, and complex. To get more insight into Barlow's book, I interviewed him via email. (I have already received a special pardon from the International Council of Real Poets for my questions...)

Amazon.com:
There once was a man from Detroit
Who found he was quite adroit
At writing with poetical pen
About territorial wolf men.

"What? No vampires or witches,
Ghosts, ghouls, or liches?"
I asked with a fanged and carious smile.
His reply? "Wolves haven't been done for awhile."

Toby Barlow:
Seems like every era has its beasts,
Reagan's unnatural youth
and that dark 80's culture of cocaine
gave birth to the Orlean's vampires of Anne Rice.
But here in this new century,
as we begin seeing things heading south
and as the seams in our civilization
become slowly unstitched,
the vibe is getting a little more feral, a little wild,
and people are starting to look 'round for the pack
they can curl up
and keep warm with.
These seem like they're werewolf days.

Amazon.com:
the dark chill howl
a shadow in the trees
Idea blossoms

Toby Barlow:
I was mulling over writing a love story when
I came across an article about a dogcatcher
which then reminded me of a pack of dogs I once saw in L.A.
So I made it a love story about animals
of a kind
'cause after all, that's what we are.
We like to kid ourselves
that we're more interested in the Platonic ideals
than a plate of steak
but really, that ain't the case.
We're animals, through and through.

I hadn't been thinking about it for years
it just sort of came to me.
Though once I started
I realized
dogs had been nipping at my heels
for most of my life.

Moomin Moomin Moomin: Bliss for the Whole Family

 

Everybody give a big thank you to Drawn & Quarterly Press, which has begun reissuing Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips in graphic novel form. The second volume just arrived at my door and like the first it's a beautiful oversized book featuring the antics of the hippo-like Moomin and his family. From dealing with obnoxious neighbors to doing ridiculous things for love, the Moomin family's adventures are funny, surreal, sometimes melancholy, and always rich and whimsical. In less skillful hands, this would be fodder for sticking one’s finger down one’s throat in revulsion at the treacly whimsy of it all. However, Tove Jansson was a pragmatist and also, if her work is any indication, a wise person. Beneath the gentle surface of Moomin there is a sly, wicked wit and much non-didactic commentary about the world and people’s place in it.

Something must be said about the effortlessness of these comic strips. There isn’t a word or image out of place. I cannot think of another comic strip that gives me as much pleasure as this one. There is also something uniquely calming and stress-relieving about reading Moomin that I can’t quite put into words but has something to do with the effortlessness I mention above. As Neil Gaiman says, "A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest." You owe it to yourself to check it out.

World Fantasy Award Winner John Picacio's Take on Michael Moorcock's Elric

Multiple award-winning artist John Picacio recently completed work on Del Rey's new edition of Elric: The Stealer of Souls, volume 1 of the Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melnibone. Picacio not only created the spectacular cover but many interior pieces, creating a truly unique book. This isn't the first time Picacio has animated Moorcock's work with his art--he also did the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Behold the Man awhile back. For Picacio, "[It] really feels like things coming full-circle because not only am I working with Mike again, but this time it's for one of the most iconic fantasy characters ever."

Picacio found Moorcock as easy to work with as the man's reputation suggests. When Picacio unveiled his "battleplan" for the Elric book, he met with Moorcock "to break it down with him [and] he just kept smiling and giving me the nod. A kind word here, a kind word there, but he...gave me virtually free rein. When I had questions, he was always quick to clarify, but never told me what to do. He's not only one of the great authors in the history of fantasy, but he's one of the great gentlemen."

Since Elric is an iconic character, I asked Picacio if he ever worried about trying to match the vision of the many readers who already have an idea in their heads of what Elric must look like. "Early on, a good friend pulled me aside and said, 'No matter what you do on Elric, you know a lot of people are gonna hate it, right?' Oddly enough, that really took the pressure off of me. I felt like, 'Hey, I might as well do my thing because there's no way to please everyone, so let's just go for it.'...[Besides,] Mike expects you to bring the absolute most potent and personal vision you can offer to the audience at the given moment."

Looking over this beautiful new edition, I'd say Picacio has accomplished what he set out to do. The art is vibrant, fluid, and complements the text perfectly--as the examples below attest. Also check out MonkeyBrain Books' beautiful Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio. And for more examples of art from Elric and a very cool contest, visit Revolution SF.

A Brilliant New Talent: J.M. McDermott

Debut novels are supposed to be creatures of a kind of limited, quicksilver brilliance: honest and earnest and showing flashes of talent. J.M. McDermott has eschewed that approach, producing the stunning Last Dragon, a kind of collaged swords-and-sorcery tale that owes as much to Gene Wolfe and the magic realists as to Fritz Leiber or George R.R. Martin. In fact, it uses a technique similar to that of Steve Erickson in his highly-acclaimed Zeroville from last year: short, sharp chapters that allow the reader room to make the book their own even as there's still a great sense of the dangerous and the surreal. It's the kind of triumph that any writer in mid-career would be proud of. As Paul Witcover wrote in a recent Sci Fi Weekly review, "this extraordinary first novel traces the labyrinthine history of a dying ruler whose patchy memories of the past swerve from the vivid to the unreliable in a hypnotic tangle of stark realism and impressionistic fantasy that has the visionary power of a fever dream. The comparison goes only so far, however. McDermott is not writing magic realism but robust fantasy, investing the traditional subject matter of the genre—magic, dragons, golems and more—with high literary craftsmanship." You can read a sample chapter on the publisher's webpage for the novel.

Who is J.M. McDermott and where did he come from? These were just two of the questions I set out to answer when I interviewed the author earlier this month...

                                                  

Self Promotion, Accomplished with Brief Interview

[Ed. note: Not Quite What I Was Planning, the book of "six-word memoirs" that we included in our Seven on the Side editors' picks this month, includes a contribution from our own Leah Weathersby, an editor on our Movies & TV team. We asked Leah to write a post on the book, and she contributed a Q&A with one of the editors of the book. You can read her six-word memoir at the bottom, and some of us plan to post our own, unpublished contributions this week as well.]

Oh the heady thrill of having a book hovering around Amazon's top 100 list. Of course like the other writers, I only have six words in Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure Writers, but I was still excited to help promote this book, not to mention learn more about the project. I e-mailed Not Quite's co-author, Rachel Fershleiser of SMITH, a few questions (six, coincidentally!) to get the skinny:

Amazon: How did the idea for the six-word memoir contest (that later turned into a book) come about? Can you put it into six words?

Rachel: Hemingway opened door, memoirists rushed in.

[Ed. note: Hemingway penned the very short story "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."]

Amazon: You do have some pretty famous contributors in this book--did they enter the contest just like everyone else, or did you have your people call their people?

Rachel: The memoirs came in a variety of ways. There were definitely recognizable names that trickled in the old-fashioned route. When we went into the backend blogging tool of the six-word project and saw someone named "Dhandler" had submitted "What? Lemony Snicket? Lemony Snicket? What?”, we were freaking out (and later confirmed it was in fact Mr. Handler/Snicket). But, yes, we also solicited memoirs from writers and artists we admire. Combining amateur and professional writing is one of SMITH’s biggest goals. Most gratifying, a lot of the famous writers went above and beyond what was asked. Joyce Carol Oates sent us "found" six-word memoirs from Emily Dickinson. George Saunders (whose "Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished." is one of our favorites) sent several memoirs and the postscript "Just noticed I wrote one above. And also wrote one just now. Oh God oh God, am trapped." Mario Batali, in true Molto Mario style, sent in seven, with an email time-stamped at around 2:45a.m., all wonderful. We thought his first idea, "Brought it to a boil, often," nailed the essence of his soul as well, or better, than a 60,000-word biography could.

Amazon: I would have expected most people to try and be funny with their entries, but it seems like you got a lot of sad memoirs as well.

Rachel: The saddest moment had to be when Ronald S. Zalewski, author of "Was father, boys died, still sad," sent us a photo of two tiny headstones. We also got a photo of a beautiful bride from her young widower ("Wife died young; on the mend."--Sumit Paul-Choudhury), and less dramatic tragedies--a lot of people are just very lonely. But there's also joy, love, gratitude, relief, optimism, and every other emotion. We like to think that, although the proportion of sad memoirs undoubtedly surprised us, the overarching theme is about learning, growing, and moving on.

Amazon: Re: the original contest, what was the winning entry?

Rachel: The original memoir was "Barrister, barista, what's the diff, Mom?" by Abigail Moorhouse. We have lots of favorites--there are hundreds of them in the book, we know nearly all of them by heart, and are grateful for each one--but Abigail Moorhouse's six words seemed to have it all. It's funny, worded perfectly, and speaks to some universal stuff: ambition, disappointment, expectations, familial angst. A life a little different than you planned, and maybe you're okay with the way it's all turning out.

Amazon: What’s next for SMITH in the realm of story-telling contests?

Rachel: Right now, we're pretty six-word obsessed. We're running another six-word memoir contest, and partnering with other great online communities to solicit six words on "the green life" (with TreeHugger), photos captions (FOUND), personal projects (ReadyMade), love stories (True Hookup Confessions), and others. You can also always submit to other SMITH projects: The PopuLIST, where we solicit 100-word stories inspired by current events, Brushes with Fame and My Ex, which are just what they sound like. And we publish memoirs-in-progress--recently a first-time writer we featured landed a book deal. We can tell you from experience, there's no greater feeling than that.

SMITH Mag is is also taking its storytelling obsession offline in ways that could not be more different than books. To name one kind of wild, exciting example, we're partnering with Rick's Picks to tell pregnancy stories on pickle jars!

Amazon: Having thought about six-word stories a lot for over a year now, do you find yourself communicating in six-word sentences more?

Rachel: Six words really is showing up everywhere--on T-shirts, in bathroom graffiti. We used to need to count on our fingers; now we know it by sight. We recently got a party RSVP written all in six-word sentences--the writer swears it was subconscious. But that's what's so exciting about this project--it gets people going. 832 people, most of whom have never been published anywhere before, have shared the most intimate details of their lives with perfect strangers. It's a manifestation of everything SMITH Mag believes about storytelling should be: populist, accessible, fun, profound, and addictive.

My six-word memoir was "lucky in love, unlucky in metabolism." You can send SMITH your own memoir here. --Leah

Here are editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser with six-word memoir contributor Summer Grimes (left), whose memoir provided the title for the book:

Best of the Month 2

The second edition of our Best of the Month feature is up on the site, with our editors picks for our favovite books of February. I'll talk about my pick below, but I should also mention that my first pick, before my colleague Jon Foro grabbed dibs on it, was David Shields's The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, which we made our spotlight pick of the month. I've read a lot of Shields's writing before (he lives in Seattle, like we do), and he always tries to strike a balance between his rather remarkable (even for a writer!) self-obsession and the larger world. Sometimes it works for me (Remote) and sometimes it doesn't (Black Planet), but I think in this one he's hit the right mix, with a topic (our inevitable biological decay) that not only balances his self-fascination, but undermines it. Or rather, both undercuts it, by showing the great and implacable forces that determine all our lives, and gives it some grandeur, by making his struggle (and his father's, and all of ours) against that relentless decline both sad and courageous.

But meanwhile, my actual choice turned out to be Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas. I've blogged about Bolano ad nauseum here over the past year (e.g. here and here), but here's what I had to say on our Best of the Month discussion board:

Despite the infinite silence that met my post about my pick last month, I'll wade in with another about this month's choice, Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas. I had a couple of reservations about picking Bolano this time. For one thing, I made his previous book, The Savage Detectives, my May pick last year and I fully expect, given all I've heard about it, to choose his next one, 2666, whenever it is released (later this year, I hope). And for another, this isn't a book I would push into the hands of everyone--it really is a weird little book, and I think you'd have to have a taste for books that don't move in a straight line (or even in any line at all) and also have a real love for reading about writers and writing (even terrible and sometimes evil writing). And Nazi Literature doesn't have the irrepressible charm of the first section of The Savage Detectives that gives you the momentum to keep reading through the meandering middle section (which I also loved, I should say). But all that said, while I was reading this one I realized I couldn't not recommend it. I'm always tempted to describe Bolano's style as non-narrative, but in fact it's just the opposite. He might not tell one single story from beginning to end, but what's most amazing about his books is that he has an infinite capacity to tell story after story after story. Each tiny (and sometimes not so tiny) made-up biography in Nazi Literature expands into a strange, wonderfully detailed, and often moving story of a single life lived with varying amounts of imagination, courage, cruelty, and illusion. And the more of these stories he tells, the more all his books come to look like one giant interconnected story (and the one story I most want to read these days).

If you've never read Bolano before, I'd still start with The Savage Detectives, but if you've already read and loved that one, keep going with this one.

I also picked two books for our Seven on the Side, about which more later: we'll be posting elsewhere on Omni about Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure Writers, and in a couple of weeks we'll have my interview with Predictably Irrational author Dan Ariely in our Wire podcast. --Tom

P.S. Just after I posted this, a friend sent a link to a Slate article about a Texas inmate who was not allowed to receive The Savage Detectives in the mail because a passage "is detrimental to offenders' rehabilitation, because it would encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior." Thanks to our Search Inside feature, you can read that section yourself, on page 39 (search on "39" to find it), which, I should make clear, does involve what the citation describes as "group sex in a public bar." For those of you for whom this is your first exposure to Bolano, I wouldn't describe it as fully characteristic of his work, except for the last sentence on the page: "'But keep telling the story, what happened next?' said Maria."

Our Moment with Ben

New York magazine knew what they were talking about when they said, "If you've laughed in the last ten years, Ben Karlin was responsible." Karlin's career kicked off as the editor of The Onion and he is the former executive producer of the award-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and co-creator and former executive producer of The Colbert Report. He was also a co-author and co-editor of the bestselling America (The Book) and his latest project takes him back to the book world as the editor of the anthology (with the best book title of 2008 so far) Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, 212 pages of semi-insightful and mostly hilarious life lessons from a lineup of writers and comedians.

I recently caught up with Karlin to talk about his new book, the ongoing writers' strike, the serious job of writing comedy, and what makes him laugh (hint: it isn't America's Funniest Home Videos). You can read the complete interview or listen to the podcast on Amazon Wire. --BTP

Amazon.com: First question I have for you... Are you sporting a strike beard?

Karlin:   [Laughs] I don't have the ability to grow a strike beard. I can grow a series of strike patches.

Amazon.com: Have you been tuning in to see how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are handling their return to the airwaves?

Karlin: You know, I haven't seen--I saw a little bit. For me, I think what's far more interesting has been not what they do in week one, but what they're going to do in week three. [Laughs] Week one you can really talk about, My god, we're back on the air and we don't have writers. You have a lot of games probably stored up. But I think the real challenge is probably going to be three or four weeks into this thing how fast they can dance. I guess those two guys probably are as well equipped as anyone on planet Earth to do that.

Amazon.com: So taking us back to December 2006 when you stepped down from your dual role as executive producer on both of those shows. I'm sure your days were filled with humor--

Karlin:   I was drunk. I just want you to know that. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done that.

Amazon.com: [Laughs] That must've been extremely stressful. Can you take us into a typical, or atypical, day for you back then?

Karlin: By the end--it was very different from when you're starting up a show than when the show has kind of found its legs. I liken it to perhaps how a small child grows. When a small child is learning to walk it's quite comical to see it on wobbly legs and it looks like it's not a small child but a drunk old man. But then the child soon learns to walk and can actually go places on its own. It's kind of the same deal with a new show. Starting up a show you always have to be around and making sure things are right and there isn't going to be a sharp object that the show will then fall and impale itself on (to keep using this metaphor until it's no longer useful).

So I think at the beginning, doing both shows, it was really like I was trying to split myself in two. Managing the day to day of The Daily Show--that's basically beyond a full-time job, and then on top of that you had the rush of the hiring of people and finding out exactly what the show was going to be, the kind of creative genesis stuff of the new show. Then once Colbert launched it was two very similar processes but in very different stages of being. So you're kind of wearing two different hats, dealing with, for example, a group of writers who have been working together for five or six years versus a group of writers who did not know each other 30 days ago. So it's a very different dynamic that you're trying to jump between different rooms, different buildings as well. And also putting on a very different type of hat in terms of how you're dealing with problems or creative challenges that come up when putting together a show.

I know that's a very obtuse kind of answer. It doesn't have the brass tacks, like, At 9AM I would have a cappuccino... But I feel like the day to day guts of putting together a comedy show is the least funny thing in the world.

Amazon.com: Did you have to turn in your scooter that you used to use to go back and forth?

Karlin:   No, I actually kept the scooter. I do not use it for such short distances anymore, though.

Best of the Month

We've introduced, somewhat quietly, a newish feature on the Amazon books pages called Best of the Month. It's an expanded version of the Significant Seven, the monthly editors' picks we started last spring, with more of our favorites highlighted (in the Seven on the Side), former editors' picks now out in paperback, leaderboards for the bestsellers of the month so far, and a very quiet (so far) discussion board (maybe I should say something about Ron Paul there and get things rolling...). We're planning to add a lot more features to the page in coming months: more of our editors' recommendations, but also ways to feature the busiest and most helpful customer reviews and discussions alongside our own. If you have anything you'd like to see on that page, please let us know, either in the discussion board on the page, or right here. We'd like it to become a one-stop shop where you can quickly get a look at the best books being released right now, and the best customer discussion going on on the site now too.