1. S. A. Griffin, a Los Angeles poet, actor, beatnik and longtime friend of LitKicks, is going to be filling the shell of a bomb with pages of poetry and touring the USA with it in 2010.
2. Here’s another bombshell: the conglomerate that publishes Kirkus, a book review magazine, has been unable to sell it and will shut it down instead. Kirkus has a big presence within the book industry because it publishes early capsule reviews of many books, and is only known to most readers as the source of countless back-cover blurbs. It’s unclear where publishers will now go to fill this back-cover blurb space. Here’s more on the Kirkus shutdown from one of their freelancers.
3. Yet another bombshell is going to drop on December 29: True Confections, an outrageous comic novel by Katharine Weber. I’ll be interviewing the author live at the new and exciting Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn on January 11. I’ll also be writing more about this book once it’s out.
4. Yes, Weber’s book is coming out December 29, after all these Best Books of 2009 lists have been published. So what are these list compilers going to do with True Confections? This is a serious problem that the listmaking industry must confront. Anyway, Dan Green is obviously getting tired of these endless best-of lists, and so is the New Yorker and Ed Champion.
5. Styles P aka “The Ghost” of the excellent hip-hop crew known alternately as D-Block or the Lox is publishing a novel with Random House.
6. A new Quarterly Conversation includes Barrett Hathcock on The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and a roundup of books that should be translated into English but haven’t been yet.
7. Jane Austen gifts. Sans zombies.
8. Arthur Sullivan’s voice, following a rendition of his mysterious Lost Chord composition, recorded at a “phonograph party” in 1888 (via @sarahw).
9. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is now talking about raw data.
10. A Belgian librarian named Paul Otlet once created an analog World Wide Web, only to see it destroyed by the Nazi invasion of Belgium during World War II.
3 Responses
Thanks so much, Levi. True
Thanks so much, Levi. True Confections has a 2010 copyright, and is in every sense but its “on sale” date a January 2010 book. Can’t wait for our Greenlight event!
Katharine, on your blog, I
Katharine, on your blog, I like your use of the term “l’esprit d’escalier,” meaning “stairway wit” (the witty thing you wish you had said in an earlier conversation, but which only occurs to you only as you descend the stairs at the end of the evening), and how you have that feeling about novels after you’ve written them. I know the feeling! My guess is, a lot of other writers do, too.
Thanks, Bill!
Thanks, Bill! (http://staircasewriting.blogspot.com/)