A year and a half ago I wrote my first post about book pricing for literary fiction, complaining that our publishing economy is mired in a creaky business model — hardcover-only first releases — that doesn’t seem to work well for any parties concerned. The fact that most fiction readers intensely dislike the tradition of hardcover-only releases seems like an obvious big flaw in the sales model to me, and at the time I wrote this first post I felt the case against …

Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai

A new novel about a Jewish family in Iran called Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer has been getting some good reviews. I hope there’s room for another novel about Jewish families in Iran this fall, though, because Gina Nahai’s Caspian Rain should not get lost in the shuffle.

Caspian Rain begins with one rich family, one poor one, and two lovestruck kids who cross the socioeconomic lines to marry. Interestingly, the discrimination young Bahar faces …

I’ve just heard that Los Angeles/Venice Beach poet Philomene Long has passed away.

I interviewed Philomene here on LitKicks last year. I was fascinated by the fact that she was a nun before she was a beat poet, and we talked a lot about religion during this interview. Philomene was also a filmmaker, as well as a close friend and creative partner of Charles Bukowski. You can read more about here at this Empty Mirror Books page or …

Francine Prose likes Bearing the Body by Ehud Havazelet very much:

Havazelet is a writer who takes huge risks, who challenges us — and himself — to love those who are the most unlovable, the most deeply and humanly flawed.

Her impassioned review of a morally challenging novel is one of the better things in today’s New York Times Book Review. Lynn Harris’s entertaining consideration of Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave is also a pleasure to read:

“I behave badly because I can,” she says. It’s …

1. Enough with the outrage about O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It. The book will be dead on arrival anyway, so who cares about it? What’s really obscene, I think, is that some publisher will probably pay Donald Rumsfeld a million dollars for If I Invaded It.

2. Garth Risk Hallberg caught the new A Midsummer Night’s Dream at New York City’s great Shakespeare in the Park. I am upset that my late August schedule of mini-vacations, Mets …

[Writer Grace Paley died yesterday at the age of 84. I asked her close friend Leora Skolkin-Smith to share some thoughts on Grace’s life and work this morning. — Levi Asher]

I bet you were wondering when I was going to get around to part two of my official Brontepalooza, weren’t you? Well, I assure you that I did not forget about the work of Anne Bronte, but I was kinda distracted with this language thing, you understand. Anyway, I am back with the reading things by people who have been dead awhile, so down to business we go. Jamelah Reads The Classics: Brontepalooza Part 2: Agnes Grey.

Agnes Grey tells the …

The Seagull is back. And I’m not talking about Anton Chekhov.

A friend of mine literally screamed — a spontaneous burst of horror — when she spotted the new edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a once-popular book from the 1970’s, on a bookstore shelf. Richard Bach’s slightly corny fable about a bird who wants to fly faster and better was the “Da Vinci Code” of its age, and people usually either like it or violently hate it. I read it when I was …

Let the cliches explode in the sky, like roman candles that burn, burn, burn and everybody says “awww”. The New York Times Book Review is a Jack Kerouac theme issue today, and I wish they’d just kill me instead.

This is why I stopped writing about the Beats on LitKicks (which launched in July 1994 with Jack Kerouac above the fold). I love Kerouac no less today than I did that innocent summer, but I have been exposed to too much bad …

1. A great contemporary artist, Elizabeth Murray, died this week. Her work was bold and aggressively dynamic, and she was completely comfortable with bright color, compositional chaos and pop culture references. In this sense, it makes sense that she was married to the poet and gadfly Bob Holman, who is also comfortable with these three things. It’s through Bob that I once met Elizabeth Murray.

It was at a big pre-opening party/reading in April 2002 for Bob’s then-brand-new Bowery …