NBCC Finalists Read from Their Books

P1040029NBCC photoThis week brings the annual awards from the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). The ceremony, to be held tonight, Thursday, Feb. 28, was preceded last night by a program in which more than 20 of the finalists read from their work. I’ll be going back to the New School tonight for the finale. Meantime, you can check out the finalists at this feature on galleycat.com, where they’ve assembled samples from all the honored titles. You may also peruse the program from last night listing all the readers and their books. Here too are the photos I took, such as this one of the elegant Zadie Smith, many of which show the author and their book cover projected alongside. I will post again after the ceremony tonight.
Saturday Update: The NBCC has now posted video of the readings night on their website:

 

Please click here to see all photos.

Hillary’s Next Book–Thoughts on a 21st Century Blockbuster

Hillary Clinton Gary CameronReutersI was glad to be consulted by reporter Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed.com for a story about one of the activities Hillary Clinton is likely to undertake now that she’s left the State Dept. That is, a book she’s said she plans to write and publish. Here’s a link to the story, “Hillary Clinton’s Unwrittten Memoir the Talk of the Publishing World.”

Because Cramer had space only for brief quotes from me and the other editors from whom she sought comment, here’s a bit more on what I talked about with her.

I pointed out that on each previous occasion when Hillary’s published a book, It Takes a Village (1996) and Living History (2004), the book world has been on the verge or in the midst of huge changes. In ’96, Amazon.com was barely a year old as an online bookstore and the Interent was just beginning to influence and define the wider culture, with the enormous impact it would soon exert on the book business. In 2004, social media was barely a blip, with Myspace one year old, and Facebook just getting started. Consider that a new Hillary book coming out, probably in 2014 or 2015, will exist in a world not only influenced by the prevalence of myriad social networks, but in a digitally dominant book space, with ebook adoption possibly on the upswing a year or two hence. I would add that while fiction has dominated ebook sales to this point, a new memoir from Hillary could become the first mega-nonfiction ebook bestseller.

While the Buzzfeed article spends a few lines discussing how high her advance might go in dollars, and for good reason, given the potential for a mammoth sum, I had suggested something different to Cramer. I said that if she was willing to take less money upfront, Hillary and her representative Robert Barnett might aim for an arrangement that would see her share profits in the book with her publisher, after expenses for production, design, distribution, and marketing were earned out. This 50/50 sharing model, though by no means common yet among authors and publishers, would also override the usual royalty structure that now applies where authors typically earn an average 15% royalty on hardcover sales, based on the book’s retail price, and 25% of the net price on ebook sales. Among brand-name authors, it has been reported that Stephen King has had this sort of profit-sharing arrangement on at least some of his titles. I should add that King publishes frequently with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. S&S was also Hillary’s publisher for her two earlier books.

I’ll close here by saying that Hillary’s next book–given her instant name recognition and worldwide notoriety, and the cultural moment–is likely to present opportunities for connecting a book with readers in a way hitherto unavailable to any author or publisher. The marketing campaign that could be arranged and implemented, given the array of tools now available, ought to be something the likes of which the book business has not seen before. It’s a book I’ll be very eager to read.

[Please note the photograph accompanying this post also ran with the Buzzfeed.com story. It is credited to Gary Cameron/Reuters.]

“Oh, No, Google, Don’t Pull a Hiring Bait & Switch!”

Despite the wording of the above tweet @GoogleLocalNYC is not really hiring, and it’s very unfortunate they’re making this claim anywhere, particularly in social media. Having been selected as a Google NYC Neighbor last spring, and after hearing a lot about community managers the past few days during NYC’s annual Social Media Week, it struck me this could be a position I’d be good at, so I clicked on their link, only to discover that while there are indeed positions to be filled, Google isn’t really doing the hiring. This is the first thing to be read when you visit the site with hiring info.

Important Notes:
Most positions are Temporary, Contract roles ( ~6 months to begin), hired via 3rd-Party staffing agency (i.e., not working directly for Google). We cannot make any guarantees about full-time Google employment opportunities at the conclusion of the Temporary contract, however the Local CM team is a great way to grow your career.

I find this a classic bait & switch, HR-style, contrasted with the literal message of the tweet. I note also that their final sentence, extolling the virtues of this experience for prospects,even though you may not end up working full-time at Google, is the arrogance that many hiring mangers display nowadays. The implicit message is

“Just remember–you’re lucky to have any work at all.”

I know it’s a hirer’s market, with job-seekers lacking leverage, but is it too much to expect that dishonesty–or at best, or carelessness–be banished from corporate hiring practices? The whole thing is unworthy of Google. I hope they take note of my reply, delete their original tweet, and revise any similar messaging they’re putting out. I’ll note it here if they do, and whether I get any kind of reply.

#FridayReads, Feb. 22–“Siege 13,” Stories by Tamas Dobozy

siege13-web#FridayReads, Feb. 22–Siege 13: Stories by Tamas Dobozy, an innovative collection of short fiction that oscillates between the Nazi siege of Budapest in 1944 and the present day. I’ve just begun digging in to the book, but find I’m already astonished by the fluency of the writing, and the way the stories pull me right in. I don’t have too much to say about it yet, so I’ll note here the review of it that ran in Quill & Quire, the magazine of the Canadian book industry (Siege 13 was published simultaneously in the US and Canada). The reviewer is writer Robert Wiersema:

The stories are varied in tone: some emphasize the horrors of war, while others–like “The Society of Friends,” about two men in love with the same woman – are darkly humorous. Gripping realism is comfortably juxtaposed with fantasy in stories like “The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto.” The pieces in Siege 13 are also unified by Dobozy’s skill as a writer. Carefully crafted, but executed with seeming effortlessness, every sentence in this collection, every paragraph, is a thing of beauty, and the stories themselves are without flaws. That said, the combination of the author’s abilities and the book’s subject matter means Siege 13 should come with a warning: take it slow. These are stories that should not be rushed through.

I will definitely take my time. Meantime, if you’d like to know more about the writer, here’s the web page for the book from its US publisher, Milkweed Editions. They sent me a review copy some months ago, I’m glad I’m finally getting to the book. The striking cover was designed by Michel Vrana, a friend who I met at the first Book Camp, an unconference about publishing.

Remembering Edward Robb Ellis, Feb. 22, 1911-Labor Day, 1998

[Editor’s Note, Feb. 22, 2013: The post below is a revised version of a piece I published on Feb. 22, 2012, the last anniversary of Edward Robb Ellis’s birthday.]

Book business friends who’ve known me for some years may recall that I’ve been extremely fortunate in working with remarkable authors of advanced age. There’s the distinguished photojournalist Ruth Gruber, who turned 102 on her last birthday, with whom I’ve had the privilege of publishing six books over the past decade and a half, including Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman–a republication of Ruth’s 1931 seminal thesis on Woolf, the first feminist reading of the author, written before she’d become an international icon–and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. Ruth’s still going strong, with a bio-documentary out on her, also called “Ahead of Time.”

Another author I began working with who was then in their eighties was Edward Robb Ellis, who like Ruth Gruber, was born in 1911. In 1985, Ellis was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific diarist in the history of American letters. By the time I met Eddie in the early 90s he had already published tremendously readable narrative histories, A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929-39; Echoes of Distant Thunder: Life in the United States, 1914-1918; and one his adopted hometown, The Epic of New York City**. In 1995 I published his magnum opus, A Diary of the Century: Tales from American’s Greatest Diarist, with an Introduction by Pete Hamill, based on the diary Eddie began keeping in 1927 at age sixteen, which he kept faithfully until the year of his death seventy-one years later. This is part of the flap copy I wrote for a 2008 reissue of the book:

Press credentials granted the eagle-eyed Ellis a front-row seat to many major events of the twentieth century, and he captures them with candor and verve, in a vivid pictorial style–whether covering politicians like Huey Long, move stars and performers such as Grace Kelly and Paul Robeson, or history-making news events, including the creation of of the United Nations. He recounts his encounter with the legendarily witty Mae West–whose press agent turns out to be feeding lines to her. He chronicles a new Orleans jazz joint where he interviews a talented young trumpeter named Louis Armstrong. He writes of taking long strolls with Harry Truman, and of observing Senator Joseph McCarthy for the first time (“His mouth is thin and long, like a knife-gash in a melon.”).
Born in Kewanee, Illinois (“Hog Capitol of the World”), Ellis moved to New York City in 1947, and lovingly documents the city’s cosmopolitanism and post-war ebullience. The sparkle in Ellis’s writing comes not solely from his meetings with the rich and famous, but from his attentiveness to, and enjoyment of, everyday life. In Ellis’s own words, this is “not a record of world deeds, mighty achievements, conquests” but “the drama of the unfolding life of one individual, day after day after day.”

When I published the book with Eddie on Labor Day in 1995, we scored a rare kind of hat trick, booking interviews on all three network morning shows. Matt Lauer interviewed him on the TODAY Show, Cokie Roberts on “Good Morning America,” and Harry Smith on CBS’s “Early Show.” It was clear that Eddie’s status as a reporter from journalism’s golden age–or at least what morning show hosts and producers believed had been a golden age–had endeared him to them. I have videos of those appearances, but unfortunately haven’t transferred them to the Web and they are not on youtube. Picture Eddie wearing a red neckerchief with a khaki safari jacket and looking very dashing on TV.

In the 2008 reissue of A Diary of the Century I included an Editor’s Note explaining that at even 200,000 words and more than 600 pages, the book had constituted less than 1% of the entire Ellis Diary. A reference book aficionado, Eddie was fond of saying that his whole diary clocked in at more than 20,000,000 words, or roughly half the length of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. My Note explained that in his later years Eddie arranged for the Ellis Diary to find

“a permanent home with the Fales Library of New York University. Indeed, even before the last day of his life–which arrived on Labor Day 1998, so fitting for a man who always called himself a ‘working stiff’–more than five dozen oversize bound volumes, were hauled from his Chelsea apartment to the Greenwich Village campus of NYU. . . . It was my privilege to read into those bound volumes of the Ellis Diary, and I promise the reader that I found no dross there. With this revival, on behalf of Eddie’s literary executor Peter Skinner and literary representative Rita Rosenkranz, I take this opportunity to state that it is our intention to revive interest in A Diary of the Century, and then go on to create new books drawn from the Ellis Diary.”

With the possibilities afforded by the Internet clearer than ever, the above goal remains high among my personal priorities. Though Eddie was suspicious of new technology, and the World Wide Web was still new when he died, A Diary of the Century, with every entry  bearing the date he wrote it, will lend itself beautifully to blogging someday; in fact, it’d be fair to say that Eddie was a kind of proto-blogger before the term was known. In addition to this recollection of Eddie, I have posted a selection of readings from his diary, and here’s a link to a recent story I wrote about Eddie’s work with Letts of London, the diary publisher who’ve been selling blank journals since 1796.

** After publishing A Diary of the Century in 1995 I also republished the three backlist books by Ellis named above. The Epic of New York City has had more than ten printings since then.

 

Readings from “A Diary of the Century” by Edward Robb Ellis

[Editor’s Note, Feb. 22, 2013: The post below is a revised version of a piece I published on Feb. 22, 2012, the last anniversary of Edward Robb Ellis’s birthday.]

Entries from A Diary of the Century by Edward Robb Ellis, about whom I blogged earlier today, on the occasion of what would have been his 102nd birthday, February 22.

Monday, October 5, 1931 This morning I got a letter from Mother saying that the First National Bank of Kewanee has closed. That’s the bank that has every cent I own. Mother also said that Grandpa Robb had all of his money there, and now Grandma is worried to death. Many of the people in Kewanee stood in front of the closed doors of the bank, weeping and cursing. One of Mother’s women friends ran up and down our street, bewailing the fact that her family has lost everything. . . . Here I am at age 20–absolutely penniless.

University of Missouri, Sunday, January 3, 1932 Today I saw my first bread line–200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

Saturday, January 9. 1932 Nace Strickland is the best room mate one could have. Today he told me something that happened when he was a child. Raised in St. Louis, he didn’t know much about country life, so he was excited when two of his aunts took him for a drive on back roads. In one pasture he saw a bull mounting a cow, whereupon Nace exclaimed: “Hey, I didn’t know those things could milk themselves.”

Kewanee, Illinois, Saturday, June 11, 1932 Last night I dreamed I held my diary under a shower and was delighted when the words did not wash off. Does this mean I think my diary may make me “immortal?”

Monday, February 19, 1934 Some of my favorite songs: My Silent Love . . . Lullaby of the Leaves . . . I’ve Got the South in My Soul . . . Time on My Hands . . . Old Rockin’ Chair . . . Piccalo Pete . . . Harmonica Harry . . . I Kiss Your Hand, Madame . . . Somebody Loves Me . . . I Surrender, Dear . . . Body and Soul . . . All of Me . . . You’re My Everything . . . Mona Lisa . . . The Man I Love . . . What Wouldn’t I Do That for Man . . . Mood Indigo. / / more . . .

NY Times Buys Into the Harper Gov’t’s View of Keystone Pipeline

Very odd that the team of three reporters who bylined the NY Times story I tweeted about so totally bought into the Harper government’s line about Keystone, with Harper’s spokespeople raising supposedly dire consequences to the US-Canadian relationship if the president decides to nix the pipeline here. The story is written as if Harper has a renewable lease on the office Prime Minister of Canada, when there will be a federal election up north no later than 2015. As critics in Canada have pointed out, increasingly Harper’s economic strategy has been shown to be that of “strip (resources) and ship them (to the highest bidder).” That the US could frustrate this design owing to what the Obama administration may ultimately rule are overwhelming environmental concerns is at least as big a problem for Harper as it ever wil be for the U.S.

Turk Pipkin’s Documentary “Building Hope” Builds Empathy & Community

Turk Pipkin 2On a recent Tuesday night I went to the Tribeca Cinema for a screening of “Building Hope,” a documentary written, directed, and narrated by actor and author Turk Pipkin, who with his wife Christy also operates  The Nobelity Project. The film chronicles the building of the Mahiga Hope High School in rural Kenya, which now completed, is educating more than 800 students  each year. The film got an Audience Award at SXSW in 2011 and it’s easy to see why–it’s very watchable and moving, with a genuinely uplifting message, all without lapsing into saccharine simplicities. The school they designed and built with the labor of local tradespeople is also a model for sustainability, as they engineered an adjacent basketball court whose roof catches and saves rain water, providing much of what’s needed for the entire facility, in this region prone to drought. I highly recommend the film for anyone interested in education, the progress of young people in the developing world and sustainable design. It’s also a tight narrative with many memorable characters, just a fine nonfiction film.

At a restaurant near the Tribeca Cinema afterward I met an Austin native now living in Brooklyn, musician and singer Kat Edmonson, who wrote a song that’s in the soundtrack of “Building Hope.” It was fun talking with Kat and her boyfriend, Aaron, also in the music biz. Since that night I’ve enjoyed listening to her music. At Kat’s website, you can listen to a free download of her winsome love song, “Nobody Knows That.” When Turk sat down at our table, it was clear that she and Turk go back a ways. A thoughtful, friendly Texan, Pipkin’s visit to NYC coincided with the availability of the companion Building Hope book, and the imminent availability of the documentary in ITunes. I’m surprised to say, though Pipkin has written 10 books, I wasn’t familiar with him until Jette Momant of PR by the Book in Austin invited me to the screening. I’ve since learned he had a stand-up career doing comedy on the road with Rodney Dangerfield; appeared as the ping pong ball juggler in “Waiting for Guffman,” Christopher Guest’s 1996 mockumentary; written many TV shows; played a recurring character in “The Sopranos”; published two novels, one with Algonquin Press; and co-authored The Tao of Willie, with Willie Nelson, who also appears on-screen in “Building Hope.” Here’s a clip from this exceptional documentary, and below the video are photos, most of which I took at the screening, some of the film itself on screen: (Please click here to see all the photos.)