#FridayReads, July 5–Amy Grace Loyd’s “The Affairs of Others,” & Jaime Joyce’s Longform Report, “Burn”

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IMG_0733IMG_0734#FridayReads, July 5–The Affairs of Others, Amy Grace Loyd’s novel of domestic manners set in a Brooklyn widow’s small apartment house where residents become much more to her–and readers–than mere tenants. I made this part of my #FridayReads last week, and continued enjoying it this holiday week, finishing the book a couple days ago. I relished Loyd’s mesmerizing sentences, many of which begged to be read out loud, with a plot that I knew from the Editor’s Buzz panel at BEA would explore the the sensual and erotic. There was great restraint in the writing, and characters I came to really care for, like the resident of the top floor, Mr. Coughlan, a longtime ferryboat captain in NY Harbor. I have lived in a NYC apartment building for more than 20 years with lots of strange neighbors, so the subplots and side characters in the book were very real to me, and remain so having finished it. No spoiler here, but I’ll say it ends, as great works of art sometimes do, with a memorable meal. The novel by Loyd, who is the fiction editor of byliner.com, will be out in early September.

I’ve now moved on to read the timely piece of narrative nonfiction, “Burn” by reporter Jaime Joyce. It’s on the 1990 Dude Fire in Arizona, where professional firefighters and inmates from a nearby prison risked their lives in confronting the dangerous blaze. “Burn” is published on a new website collecting longform journalism called The Big Roundtable, where I am a reader participating in their process of selecting new stories.  The Big Roundtable is the brainchild, in part, of Michael Shapiro, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and an author whose book, Solomon’s Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away, I edited some years ago.

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#FridayReads, June 28–Valerie Plame & Sarah Lovett’s “Blowback,” & Amy Grace Loyd’s “The Affairs of Others”

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Working my way through my BEA piles for this week’s #FridayReads: Blowback by Valerie Plame & Sarah Lovett; quite a good, pacy thriller setting an American female operative amid a covert operation to apprehend a villainous underworld puppetmaster  who’s selling clandestine nukes to dangerous international players, and killing off the operative’s sources. Coming out in October from Blue Rider Press, this is Plame’s first novel, after her 2007 Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. That book was heavily redacted by the Bush-era CIA, and though it had a well-reported Afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen, the many blacked-out passages inevitably left readers in the dark. Because I had worked on her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s 2003 book, The Politics of Truth: Insider the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, which with Fair Game had formed the basis of the Naomi Watts and Sean Penn 2009 movie of the same name, I was of course interested to read Valerie’s latest book. I had hoped it would be good, and happily have found that her first thriller, written with Sarah Lovett, has an intriguing plot with lots of surprising twists and great insight in to, and empathy for, the complex and sometimes troubled lives of undercover agents, women and men. No redactions this time around!IMG_0657IMG_0656IMG_0655

Have moved on to read The Affairs of Others, Amy Grace Loyd’s novel of modern manners set in a Brooklyn widow’s apartment house, with fascinating cross-currents among her and her tenants. Elegant and smooth sentence-making, with a plot that I know from the BEA Buzz Editors’ panel presentation on the book is going to soon turn toward the sensual and erotic. Knowing that’s to come, it’s all the more notable for its restraint in the first 70 pages. It’s worth adding that I live in a New York apartment building with lots of strange neighbors, so the subplots and side characters in the book are starkly real. The novel by Loyd, who is the fiction editor of byliner.com, will be out in early September.

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Serendipity During Book Expo America

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One of the things I love about BEA is the prospect of serendipitous meetings. One spontaneous encounter I had during the convention at the beginning of June was when I bumped in to a friend, the literary agent Laura Nolan, who was on the floor at the Javits Center with her author client Dagmara Dominczyk, whose first novel, The Lullaby of Polish Girls, is out from Speigel & Grau this month. We got to talking, and soon Dagmara’s publicist from Random House took this picture of the three of us with my digital camera. Here Dagmara is in the center, between me and Laura.

Her novel has drawn lavish praise from fellow writers and Dominczyk was the subject of a NY Times Style section profile last Sunday, centered on her recent reading at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, an historically Polish enclave, an event that became a homecoming for the novelist.

When I read the Times story about the reading at WORD I was relieved to find one of the least snarky pieces I’ve read in the Style section. I find that part of the paper has a pronounced predilection for snark and sarcasm, and I often avoid it entirely.  (See the recent story on tech change agent Rachel Sklar, which framed her new entreprise that seeks to “change the ratio” of women in tech, as her “trying” to become an entrepreneur). Even while the article on Dagmara likened the attractive author and her sisters to the Gabor sisters of the 1960s, and highlighted her marriage to actor Patrick Wilson, it didn’t stint on informing readers that Dagmara, 36, had attended LaGuardia HS, the Manhattan high school of the performing arts, and moved to Greenpoint with her sister where she wrote her novel, after she got her first really good movie role.

LaGuardia happens to be where my teenage son Ewan will be a senior in the fall, also in the drama department, but that’s not the only coincidence I found in the story: Dagmara’s big break came when she got a lead role in the 2002 version of “The Count of Monte Cristo”  This is a genre–the swashbuckler–that I love.  Additionally, I  am about to begin offering to publishers a terrific proposal for a new anthology of swashbuckling fiction.  It will naturally include selections from Alexandre Dumas, whose own father is the subject of Tom Reiss’s 2012 Pulitzer-winning biography, Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. It is kind of an eternally sturdy genre.  Cultural consumers always seem ready to take in and enjoy a new swashbuckling book or film.  In the proposed anthology, editor Lawrence Ellsworth will include a new Dumas translation of his own, along with pieces by Rafael Sabatini (author of Captain Blood and Scaramouche); Johnston McCulley (creator of Zorro), Anthony Hope (Prisoner of Zenda); Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel); Arthur Conan Doyle, and about 15 great and ripe-to-be remembered writers.

All that from a meeting on the convention floor! It’s things like this that keep the book business fun.

Here are the great advance comments that Dagmara’s book has received, from Emma Straub and Adriana Trigiani, who introduced Dagmara at WORD.

“The Lullaby of Polish Girls is a striking and vivid debut novel, absolutely buzzing with energy. Dagmara Dominczyk’s freshly observed story about the intertwined lives of three friends is both sexy and sensitive, with a raw, openhearted center. Dominczyk’s love for her complicated characters is apparent from the first page to the last, and by the novel’s end the reader cares for them just as deeply.”—Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures

“The Lullaby of Polish Girls will make you swoon. Dagmara Dominczyk has written a glorious debut novel inspired by her own emigration from Poland to Brooklyn with depth, intensity, humor, and grace. Dagmara is a natural-born storyteller. I’m crazy about this book, and I know you will be too.”—Adriana Trigiani, author of The Shoemaker’s Wife

I wish Laura and Dagmara much success with the book. imgres

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Remembering Maurice Sendak on his 85th Birthday

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The animated doodle on Google’s main search page today is really inspired. If you haven’t already seen this tribute to Maurice Sendak, there’s a screen shot below. You can view it via this link, and make sure you click on the arrow to start the animation.
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Last May, soon after Sendak’s passing, I published a recollection on this blog called, Warding Off a Zealous Censor of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. Via this link, I invite you to read about this episode from my bookselling days, when a prudish religious conservative woman demanded we stop selling Sendak’s work.

Update: I also just found this animated video on the Daily Beast narrated by Sendak himself.

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#FridayReads, June 7–Eric Lundgren’s “The Facades” & Suzanne Corkin’s “Permanent Present Tense”

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#FridayReads, June 7–The Facades by Eric Lundgren–a witty and heart-filled novel about a man in a post-apocalyptic world who’s searching for his family. I’m also reading Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. by Suzanne Corkin–a scientific biography of a historic medical subject, a man who after undergoing brain surgery suffered a permanent loss of his capacity to make and retain long-term memory. In 2008, when I was Editorial Director of Union Square Press, I heard an NPR segment about Prof. Corkin’s work with H.M. and contacted her to ask if she was writing a book. Indeed, she said she was working on a manuscript, though she added it was a long way from completion and she suggested I should stay in touch with her agent. When I left the job in 2009, I wondered what would become of the project. At BEA last week I was pleased to see it had ended up on the list of Basic Books. Please click through to see full post and all pictures

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One More BEA In the Books

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It was not the most energetic Book Expo America (BEA) I’ve ever attended, but it was still a good show for me. Wednesday–when the Buzz panel was held, before the Exhibit Hall officially opened–was a good day. And then the next 3 days (Thursday-Saturday) were a roller coaster with busy, agitated activity to slow times when one could imagine the proverbial bowling balls rolling down the carpeted aisles. On Friday afternoon, there were so many publishing executives off the main part of the floor–I surmised many of them were in meetings, closeted behind the black curtains I saw that shrouded makeshift conference rooms at a distance from the publishers’ stands–that there was a palpable deflation of activity out on the floor. And yet, over all, I picked up many galleys and download cards of important forthcoming books. It took three jumbo zippered red totes that I’d kept picking up at the McGraw-Hill stand to drag it all home, which I did by myself. 

On Saturday, BEA for the first time ever opened itself to members of the reading public, not just book industry professionals. I saw many well-organized groups of fans and other readers powering around the floor, often under the concierge-like care of publicists who brought them en masse to signings with authors like Sylvia Day (at Harlequin), and Jami Attenberg and Jeffrey Deaver (at Hachette). There must have been at least 20 lines I saw like that today. I also saw smaller groups of two or three Power Readers, as the BEA dubbed them, eagerly snapping up galleys and stuff. I know there were some book industry people who, when the announcement of this innovation was made, were skeptical it would be a good thing, but I’d say that this not so daring–and to me, welcome–experiment went very well, indeed.

I took a pic of the jacket of David Folkenflik’s forthcoming Murdoch’s World: The Last of Old Media Empires, a book I’m very eager to read, having in 2008 edited and published a book on Roger Ailes, Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes by Kerwin Swint.Murdoch book

I’ll have more to write and share about the book convention over the next few days and weeks, with photos and reporting. Meantime, glad to get a post up today, even though I’m exhausted from the four days of the show.

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Book Expo America–Off to a Quick Start on Day I

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Buzz panelAlthough the exhibit floor doesn’t open until tomorrow, there was lots of activity at the Javits Center today. My wife and I stopped in the hall just before 10:00 AM and got our badges as certified press, covering BEA for this blog. In the late afternoon, was the annual Editors’ Buzz panel, where a select panel of editors get to pitch their favorite titles of the coming fall season. By far the most exciting presentation was made by Liese Mayer [spelling corrected here from above tweet], of Overlook Press who touted the novel she acquired just after joining the company, The Facades, a first novel by Eric Lundgren. She said the novel combined elements of Kafka’s forbidding city and Batman’s modern Gotham. I grabbed one of the galleys and, after her compelling presentation, am eager to start reading the book. I also was interested in the presentation by  Picador editor Anna deVries of The Affairs of Others, a novel by Amy Grace Loyd and so took a galley of it. Now, running off to evening activities!

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A New NBCC Award for a First Book, in Honor of John Leonard

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I am an associate member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), the only association of freelance and full-time book critics in the country. Readers of this blog may recall the superb literary event, with readings and awards, they put on every spring in NYC. This link is for my coverage of the most recent celebration this past March

This morning I was excited to learn that the NBCC is adding a new category for their annual awards, a citation that will recognize the best first book of the year. It could be a novel, a book of short stories, a memoir–it will not be limited to a particular genre. The award will be given in memory of the late John Leonard, longtime NBCC member, and eternally effervescent man of letters. The announcement was just emailed to members, with the screenshot of it pasted in below these lines. The NBCC is a great organization of dedicated readers and writers. You can follow them on Twitter, @BookCritics and check them out on the web, NBCC.

NBCC.

 

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