Sold: “The Twenty-ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra” by Alex Messenger

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

One of the most exciting things in my work as an independent editor and literary agent is when I have the opportunity to work with a new writer on their manuscript, helping them develop it to the point where a publisher later makes an offer to publish it. That is what’s occurred with writer Alex Messenger’s book, The Twenty-ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra, which I recently sold to Blackstone Publishing. They’re an Ashland, Oregon-based company that in the past couple years has grown from being a publisher of audio books only (several months ago I sold them audio rights to The Last Days of Sylvia Plath), to now having a full print program, with reissues such as Mr & Mrs Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and their Entertainment Empire by Kathleen Sharp (by coincidence I edited the original edition for Carroll & Graf Publishers in 2004) and new, never-before-published titles. Below is a lightly edited version of the pitch letter I submitted to editors with the manuscript, prompting the offer from Blackstone. 

A denizen of the wild places and freshwater lakes of northern Minnesota, by his early teens Alex Messenger had already gone on many wilderness and canoeing journeys, sometimes with his family, other times with peers through a local YMCA camp. The summer he was seventeen, a friend encouraged Alex to be a paddler on what would be his most ambitious trip yet: 

“’You should come,’ Mike urged me. Going on the Hommes du Nord expedition would mean spending forty-two days traveling through northern Canada, a near month and a half on trail, of whitewater canoeing, of portaging, of sleeping on a thin mat in a thin tent, forty-two days of dried food, adventure and fresh air.”

For the first twenty-eight days, Alex and his fellow paddlers confronted many difficulties in the Canadian sub-Arctic, including ferocious whitewater rapids that challenged their paddling skills, and an island locked in by shifting ice that barely allowed them to paddle their canoes away from it. The most dangerous animals they encountered were ornery musk-oxen. But on the twenty-ninth day all that changed when on a solitary hike Alex encountered a grizzly bear that attacked him. A life and death struggle ensued as Alex tried to retreat from the bear’s grasp, then bounced his heavy camera case off the bear’s snout, all before slipping in to a state of semi-consciousness. 

When Alex came to, he was alone, wounded and bleeding but somehow still alive. Forcing himself upright, he struggled back to camp in terrible pain from a severe thigh wound, where he was soon being treated by his resourceful companions who sought advice on emergency care from doctors back home via their satellite phone. An immediate evacuation was considered, but in the short term they resumed the canoe journey, hoping to reach the point on the map where the whole expedition was due to conclude at a remote fly-in village. In the days that followed, Alex tried to make himself useful on the water, helping to paddle when he could, though his injuries made the effort excruciating while aggravating the wound.  

A few days later, Alex, his fellow paddlers, and the camp directors back in Minnesota faced a difficult decision: let the party navigate to the village, or have Alex evacuated right then. I will let you discover their decision for yourself. 

The 85,000 word manuscript recounts an unusual coming-of-age story filled with inspiring descriptions of Arctic landscape, thrilling riverine adventures, and high risk adventure, all written more than a decade later from the perspective of a more mature Alex Messenger, who continues to enjoy wilderness camping and works in the outdoors and camping equipment industry with outfitter Frost River, for which he attends many trade shows; these will afford him an excellent opportunity to promote the book. 

Two comparable books that you might look to as models of success would be Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston and The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, which it so happens I edited and published at Carroll & Graf in 2001. 

Below is an announcement that ran in the book industry newsletter Publishersmarketplace. The photographs illustrating this post are by Alex Messenger, whose Instagram handle is @messengerphoto. If you enjoy adventure and survival narratives such as  Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (where by contrast the young protagonist did not survive his wilderness ordeal), Admiral Richard Byrd’s Alone, and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, then you’ll definitely enjoy The Twenty-ninth Day  when it’s published in 2019 or 2020.

 

Read more

Remembering Drue Heinz—Prolific Cultural Benefactor—and Ellen Hunnicutt, Novelist of Music and the Circus

/1 Comment/in , , /by

I discovered Ellen Hunnicutt and her novel in my first publishing job, a six-week stint I did at Scribner Publishing as first reader/contest judge for the Maxwell Perkins Prize, named in honor of the house’s venerable editor of many important writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. Mildred Marmur, Scribner’s publisher at the time, then and since a great friend to me and many other publishing people, gave me what became my first break in publishing. I’d been referred to her to inquire about a full-time editorial job; I made an appointment, went to see her and introduced myself, explaining I’d worked in my family’s bookstore business for seven years, and wanted to become an editor. She said she had no full-time editorial positions open, but there was the Perkins contest to judge, and a conference room full of mailed submissions awaiting the attentions of a first reader. As a bookseller I’d read and sold A. Scott Berg’s Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius and was thrilled with the job. Working three days each week, I sat in Scribner’s conference room with jiffy bags and manuscripts stacked up around me like drying cord wood. My assignment was to unpack all these mailers and read between 5-50 pages of each entry, fill out a brief questionnaire, and signal a thumbs-down or -up for a possible second reading by the full-time editorial staff. Coincidentally, I recommended 70 entries, or 10%, for second readings. There was one entry I really loved, by a writer called E.M. Hunnicutt, for which I eagerly read far more than the 50 pages. My recommendation of it was more enthusiastic than for any other candidate, but it didn’t win the prize. Before finishing the job, I wrote down the author’s phone number and made a copy of the manuscript.

With this first stretch in the ink mines under my belt, I did soon get my first full-time editorial job, at Walker & Company, then a sleepy publisher of young adult non-fiction and genre fiction (Westerns, mysteries, Regency romances, etc.), published mostly for libraries. My genre was to be “men’s adventure.” Still, Walker had in its early years published books by John Le Carre and Flann O’Brien, so I was hopeful that I wouldn’t only be acquiring the male equivalent of bodice-rippers. My first week at Walker I called the E.M.-initialed author and soon found myself talking with “Ellen” Hunnicutt. She told me she’d long used the initials to disguise her gender, since she had sold many stories to Boys’ Life over the years. I told her how much I had liked reading her draft manuscript, with its compelling narrator, Ada, an adolescent girl and musical prodigy who’s fled a bizarre custody battle that engulfed her family in the wake of her mother’s death. She’s sought safe harbor amid a circus troupe that’s wintering over in a quiet Florida camp and found solace in composing a requiem for her late mom on the troupe’s calliope. Ellen and I hit it off beautifully and her novel became the first original manuscript I ever acquired. Over the year that followed, Ellen and I engaged in a vigorous dialogue about her novel and its theme–the creative purposes to which suffering and mourning may be put. In the course of my editing and her revising, Ellen became reinvigorated with her own book, which she’d earlier thought she’d finished. In the course of the edit, she told me about other circus and carny writers, like Jim Tully, whose his 1927 book, Circus Parade she praised for its unsentimental portrait of the raffish big-top life, which influenced her work. She explained she’d read many of Tully’s books early in her life and that his fiction and nonfiction chronicles of hobo life, circus characters, and the down-and-out of the Great Depression had still been widely read when she was a young woman.

For the record, I should add that before Suite for Calliope was published in July of 1987 it received a starred review in Kirkus*; later, Dell bought the paperback rights, and Walker sold out its first hardcover printing. The starred Kirkus happened to land on my desk on May 4, a fateful date on my perpetual calendar: the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State in 1970, the date that Undercover Books opened for business in 1978, and Ellen Hunnicutt’s birthday, which I didn’t even know when I phoned her with the news and read it to her, in this time before fax machines were common, affording me the opportunity to place one of the happiest birthday calls I’ve ever made. And then, before the novel went to the printer, Ellen was notified she’d won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short fiction, described in the Facebook post above, and that the senior judge for the award had been Nadine Gordimer, who wrote in her citation: “Ellen Hunnicutt is adventurous… and her images are splendidly suggestive….Witty stories, jubilantly told.”

Working with Ellen was a great privilege and affirmed my ardent interest in modern nomads and the circus life. For a 2004 Carroll & Graf anthology, Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus, my editorial colleague who made the selections, Nate Knaebel, smartly chose to include a chapter from Suite for Calliope, which he wrote “describes the anticipation of opening day at an Indiana circus, and a near tragedy averted by the power of music.” Nate also included “With Folded Hands Forever,” a dark passage from Tully’s Circus Parade.

Ellen kept writing in the years that followed, and we remained in touch. However, I’m sad to report that the two books Ellen published in 1987 would be the only books she published in her lifetime, which came to an untimely end in 2003. She was 72. If you’re intrigued by the themes and motifs of her work, I urge you to seek out her books. As for Drue Heinz, the obit from the Pittsburgh Press-Gazette is linked to here.  http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2018/03/30/Drue-Heinz-former-publisher-of-The-Paris-Review-dies-at-103/stories/201803300124

The starred Kirkus review of Suite for Calliope:
“An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. Ada Cunningham, of Richmount, Indiana is the partly crippled daughter of gifted and highly eccentric parents: a journalist mother who declares Ada to be a prodigy, raises her as such (with flamboyant elan), then dies suddenly when her daughter is eight years old; and a father who is a musical genius, who came from poverty and was a transient violinist and artful dodger as a child, who gives Ada music lessons from the time she’s three, and who is committed to an asylum before she is 16. Life with these parents–as described by the brave, unflinching, quick, forgiving, and heartwrenchingly observant Ada–would be matter enough for many a novel, but this one soars on toward farther ends that keep the reader wide-eyed and enthralled. There’s a penetrating mystery at the heart of it all, and, before its solution: an aunt who comes into the picture with malevolent aims (she may even want to murder Ada), a burned house, legal proceedings–as result of all of which Ada, accused of being both a witch and a madwoman, flees Richmount and takes to the road (as her father did before her), supporting herself by her wits and by her gifted piano playing (in brothels and bars), until at last she finds sanctuary and refuge in the winter quarters of a circus troupe–with setting, color, and cast of characters worthy of yet another novel–where she becomes (and remains) calliope player, composer, and loved member of this wondrous new “family.” A summary leaves out far too much: the sturdy grace of Ada’s never-self-pitying voice; the continual feast of homely detail, and detail of music, musicians, and musical instruments, as weft as of the circus and its people; and the breathtaking symbolic depth of the whole, which, touched by the hand of this gifted writer, serves to place Ada’s birth, her flight, and her high artist’s quest among very august novelistic company indeed. A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.”

Read more

“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers'”—Wall St Journal

/0 Comments/in , /by

I’m delighted to see a superb review in this weekend’s Wall St. Journal of my agency client Lawrence Ellsworth’s new translation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. It appears in the print paper under the headlines “Less than Perfect Heroes,” and to the left in a scanned mock-up of the review  Here are some of the choicest bits:

“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers’ by the American Lawrence Ellsworth captures all the excitement and flair of Dumas’s great historical adventure that spawned several sequels and numerous films, TV series and cartoons….

Mr. Ellsworth does a wonderful job of communicating the energy, humor and warmth of Dumas’s work. This was not always the case with the translations of the 1840s and 1850s—still the ones most likely to be found in American bookstores and libraries—which mimic the rather stiff, elevated diction of writers like Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Ellsworth’s snappier approach, which included putting back all the racier scenes elided from the Victorian translations, suits Dumas much better.

It also helps to put an end to the lie, persistent in the English-speaking world, that Dumas’s brand of popular fiction does not deserve the same attention as more ‘serious’ works. It was not something that Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about writing romantic adventures, would have ever subscribed to. ‘I do not say there is no character as well-drawn in Shakespeare,’ he wrote of d’Artagnan. ‘I do say there is none that I love so wholly.’”

This first new English-language edition of The Three Musketeers to come out in many years book is published by Pegasus Books, and is listed here on their website, with click-thru options to buy it if you wish. Their handsome hardcover edition—priced well at $26.95 for a volume that’s close to 800 pages—includes an Introduction, Dramatis Personae: Historical Characters, and Notes on the Text assembled by translator Ellsworth, who also selected period illustrations by Maurice Leloir for the title page spread and chapter openers. It is also available in all ebook formats. Ellsworth is the translator of Book II in Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx, and editor of the anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, both from Pegasus Books.

Read more

Sold: “The Last Days of Sylvia Plath,” Important New Book on the Great Female Poet

/1 Comment/in , /by

Last May I mentioned on this blog that as literary agent I was developing a book project with an author client who would be writing an important new book on Sylvia Plath. I’m happy to announce that that proposed book is now under contract with a publisher. The author and I are very excited about the arrangement we’ve made. The book will be titled The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, and the author is prolific biographer Carl Rollyson. We’ve sold it to the University Press of Mississippi. In a concise narrative, Rollyson will chronicle the last four months of the poet’s life, drawing on hitherto unexamined sources, including the archive of Harriet Rosenstein, a controversial figure who in the 1970s undertook a biography of Plath that she never completed or published. Rollyson’s book will be an imperative study apt to re-shape the way readers view the end of the poet’s tragically abbreviated life. I posted an announcement of the deal earlier today at publishersmarket[dot]com (listing below). The manuscript will be delivered to the publisher in early 2019.

Read more

The Indomitable Alexey Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s Most Charismatic Critic

/1 Comment/in , , , /by

In case you haven’t seen this yet, it’s an important op-ed by my agency client Amy Knight’s in the LA Times today about Alexey Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s popular and charismatic critic. If you don’t know about him yet, you ought to because he’s got a chance to mount a credible challenge to Russia’s political status quo, and is making some headway despite an autocratic environment. The piece reports he has 80 campaign offices and more than 130,000 volunteers. Putin and his government are trying to sideline Navalny and scuttle his candidacy in next year’s presidential election by using the courts to keep him off the ballot. The piece is about 1000 words, so a 5-7 minute read and drawn from reporting for her book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime & Political Murder. It went on sale this past Tuesday, from St Martin’s Press (ordering info here). I believe it is going to be very widely read and discussed. Thanks for sharing word about it if you have friends keeping any eye Russia’s ongoing politics, not just for what they’ve done in recent years and months, but for what is still to come. The book will help readers understand the Putin system, so necessary for us going forward since his displacement—by Navalny, or anything or anyone else—is unfortunately way more than a long shot. Note that with Russian law mandating 6-year presidential terms, if re-elected, Putin could be Russia’s leader till 2024, a worrying thought for the West. Still, if anyone could do it, Navalny is the one to watch most closely, for his canny maneuvering which includes a fed-up anti-corruption message that could stand alongside Trump’s failed promise to “drain the swamp.” In Russia, with the economy flat, and ordinary people falling behind, and businessmen and bankers cleaning up, Navalny rails against privileged plutocrats and means it. Navalny also bears watching because of the uncomfortable conclusion that his personal security could be at risk. Amy concludes her piece with a quote from the dissident:

“In an interview with the BBC in January, Navalny, who is married with two children, was reminded of what happened to Nemtsov and asked if he realized the danger he faced. Navalny, whose political support far surpasses [the late Boris] Nemtsov’s popularity, assured his interviewer that he was fully aware of the risks of opposing Putin. As to his motivation, he added: ‘This is my country and I am going to fight for my country. I know that I am right.’”

Read more

South African Anti-Apartheid Activist Stephen Biko Died in Police Custody Forty Years Ago Today

/0 Comments/in , , /by

After Stephen Biko’s death following a brutal police interrogation in 1977, an atrocity that the South African government tried covering up, the anti-apartheid newspaper editor Donald Woods, who’d known Biko, quickly wrote and smuggled out of the country a manuscript* that was his combined biography of Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) he’d been a key leader of, and an exposé on the case. The book added fuel to the controversy in Western countries about the conduct of the corrupt regime. It was an amazingly timely and powerful book, and instilled in me a love for ripped-from-the-headlines books, the sort that I’ve been partial to ever since. Biko was published in 1978 around the time my siblings and parents and I were getting ready to open our bookstore, Undercover Books, and it was among the first books I ordered for our opening stock. With the scandal that ensued from Biko’s death, ownership of Woods’s book became a crime in South Africa. I was very proud we sold many copies in Cleveland. Woods lived many years in Britain, and was still on the scene when Nelson Mandela finally became free.

*When I said above that Donald Woods smuggled his manuscript for Biko out of South Africa, I could’ve added that he carried it out himself, in clandestine fashion, so it could be published in the West. He and his family fled the country in a land cruiser sort of vehicle, in back country, crossing a frontier to a neighboring country where there was no guard post. A brave man with nerves of steel—Woods was determined to honor the memory and sacrifice of a true human rights martyr by first writing the book, and then putting his life, and his family’s lives, on the line to make sure the manuscript would make it to publication. That’s commitment!

 

Read more

Enjoying Many Happy Reunions & First Meetings at Book Expo 2017

/1 Comment/in , , /by

I’ve long since quit keeping track of how many annual Book Expo conventions I’ve attended since Undercover Books opened in 1978; over the past 39 years I’d say I haven’t missed more than five of these trade shows. I’ve written about many of them on this blog. Last year was a miss with the show in Chicago, so I was glad that the Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan was the venue once more for the 2017 rendition of the book industry’s annual get-together. Though the show is diminished in attendance and book industry importance since the glory days when it was known as ‘the ABA,’ the period when the American Booksellers Association, the trade association of indie booksellers, owned and ran the convention. It was a great asset, but eventually they sold the show to a company that ran trade shows; currently, it’s owned by Reed Exhibitions. Their management and the choices they make each year about the show is a topic of much discussion and some controversy among booksellers and publishers.

While registering on Wednesday afternoon, May 31, I was startled to see #TrumpRussia figure Carter Page in line after I’d registered, which prompted some quick picture-taking and tweeting from me before my first event. As I was that afternoon, I’m still very curious about what he was doing at the show. Hoping to sell and publish a book? Or, perhaps he already has one in the works? I figure it was one of these—why else would he attend Book Expo? Maybe he hopes to take the same route that the guy who goes by Milo has announced he’ll do: self-publish. And yet, if he’s gonna tell his story, I imagine the congressional committees and Special Counsel Mueller would want to hear it first. That could set up a constitutional struggle: Page’s interest in exercising his free speech rights versus the legislature’s and the law’s interest in exercising their key oversight and criminal prosecution authorities. I love Book Expo for this—you never know who you might see next! One year, I saw former FEMA Commissioner Michael Brown (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”, courtesy George W. Bush) just a year or two after Hurricane Katrina.just a year or two after Hurricane Katrina.

The fair’s kickoff event, held before the show floor would open the following morning, was the Editors’ Buzz Panel, where each year six editors are invited to talk about the one book they’re bringing out in the coming months that has them and their publishing house colleagues most excited. In past years, while the lineup always skewed heavily toward fiction—a product, I guess, of the notional that novels lend themselves to hand-selling by booksellers more readily than nonfiction, not an idea I endorse—there would usually be at least one or two nonfiction books among the novels. Not so this year, when it was six novels, one after another, with each editor being introduced at some length by moderator Annie Philbrick, co-owner of Bank Square Books in Mystic, CT, and Savoy Bookshop & Café in Westerly, RI. I’m sure all the novels are worthy, but the program choice led, in my opinion, to an at times leaden and repetitive recitation of plot points, reading of blurbs, and comparisons to other novels, that lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. The other issue I had with the program was the exclusive predominance of big-house publishers, (e.g., three titles from imprints at Penguin Random House, one title from an S & S imprint, one from Hachette, and one from Harper), with no mid-sized majors or indie presses in the mix. Are we supposed to believe there were no worthy titles from among publishers like Grove Atlantic, Norton, Algonquin, Graywolf, Counterpoint, Beacon Press, Other Press, and others of their ilk?

Of the six novels presented (each  mentioned here), I found myself most interested in possibly reading The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Matthews, a first novel set in NYC during the 1939 World’s Fair, and The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, the conceit for which is that a fortuneteller can tell characters the very day they’ll die. The whole program would have flowed much better with some adjustments and variation, including briefer presentations by the editors (some seemed stretched to fifteen minutes, which would never be tolerated at a sales conference) and by injecting some narrative nonfiction in to the mix. After the last presenter finished, there was a mad scramble of people rushing to the back of the room to get ARCs of the six books, but it was so intensely crowded, I felt someone could’ve been trampled. Surely, there must be a better way to distribute the reading copies than a mad scrum that has people gasping for air! I hope the Buzz Panel programmers take note of these points for next year’s panel.

After hours, Book Expo always offers action, and this year was no exception as the sales rep group Parson Weems Publisher Services celebrated its 20th anniversary as a company with a delightful bash at the Landmark Tavern, near the Javits Center. PW sales reps Chris Kerr, Linda Cannon, Eileen Bertelli, and Jason Kincade were great hosts and I enjoyed drinks with many people there in the back room of the tavern, with the late afternoon light fading to early evening as the party unfolded, and the good ale they serve. Glad I could introduce my brother-in-law Ev Taylor to many old friends at the party.

The convention floor opened the next morning, and thanks to the MTA’s new subway stop for the #7 train at Tenth Ave and 34th St (which has the steepest, most vertical escalators I’ve ever seen in NY’s subway), I was right on time for my first meeting of the day. Chance encounters also quickly bloomed, as I bumped in to old and new friends like John Whelan of the superb gift book publisher Cider Mill Press; Tom Nevins, longtime member of the Random House sales force; B.J. Berti, Senior Editor for crafts and illustrated books, St Martin’s Press, to whom I was introduced by another old friend, Mike Shatzkin, one of whose new ventures, OptiQly, was being introduced at Book Expo; Peter Costanzo, digital publishing specialist for the AP; Kevin and Spencer Williams, Talonbooks, Vancouver, BC, who are clients of Consortium, a distributor that’s especially good with literary lines, were excitedly sharing with booksellers copies of one of their lead books, Anima; Rob Sanders, Greystone Books, Vancouver, BC, who had a big hit this year with The Hidden Life of Trees, which he’s following up this fall with The Hidden Life of Animals; and Herb Simon, Chairman Emeritus of the group that owns Kirkus, with whom I discussed the NBA, since he’s principal owner of the Indiana Pacers; George Greenfield, literary and lecture agent, who I chatted with in the crowded aisle in front of Hachette’s stand; Michael Korda, who’s publishing a new book with Liveright, Alone, an historical chronicle on the 1940 evacuation from Dunkirk, which he experienced firsthand as a 6-year old child.

I had prepared a memo that outlined all the current projects I’m agenting, and was pleased in several of my meetings with publishers and editors to register interest for the proposed new titles:

  • The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, a new book about the last months of the poet’s life;
  • Dirty Windshields: A Canadian Rock n’ Roll Band’s Misadventures Across the USA and Beyond, CBC broadcaster Grant Lawrence’s hilarious and heart-tugging book about his years as frontman and lead singer of the breakthrough punk band, The Smugglers
  • The Lust Club: Confessions of a Prada Model, a one-of-a-kind memoir by a male fashion model;
  • The Twenty-Ninth Day: A Dangerous Journey in the Canadian Arctic, a wilderness survival story the center of which was the grievous mauling by a grizzly bear suffered by the author
  • Ten Garments Every Man Should Own, by Toronto writer Pedro Mendes, publisher of The Hogtown Rake menswear blog;
  • A book about the development of Rap music through the history of sampling, Bring That Beat Back, and another music title by a true pioneer of electronic and hip-hop music;
  • How Horses Help us Heal: Reports from the Field, a deeply spiritual book about equine therapy that surveys the many equine therapy centers in the US;
  • Crash Test: How an Automaker Evaded Accountability, a corporate whistleblower’s account of a company’s lethal malfeasance;
  • Macoupin, a novel of the American prairie spanning 1800 to the near-present, by Jack Heinz. “Caste and class are most subtly yet vividly described in prose as spare and suggestive as an Edward Hopper landscape.”—Ward Just

It was exciting to represent these books and authors at Book Expo.

I got in an autograph line to meet Mira Bartok, whose earlier book, a memoir set in Cleveland about her schizophrenic mother, called The Memory Palace, I had found very compassionate. So did the National Book Critics Circle, which gave it their memoir prize in 2011. Her new book is a departure, a YA fantasy novel called The Wonderling. I also stood in line a while to get a book signed by actor William Daniels, who played Dr Craig in “St Elsewhere,” and had a memorable role in “A Thousand Clowns” with Jason Robards, Jr. Little did I know how hugely popular he is, so after some time waiting, I exited the very long line, but first got a picture of him signing his acting memoir, There I Go Again. Later, I did hang on in a shorter line long enough to meet Brooke Gladstone, longtime co-host of one of my favorite public radio programs, “On the Media,” author of The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, a copy of which she signed for me. I also stood in line for novelist Mark Helprin, who as a younger author back in the day twice traveled to Cleveland for successful events at Undercover Books, for his outstanding early books A Dove of the East and Winter’s Tale (the latter for an event that drew hundreds of people in 1983). On this occasion, I had scrawled my name on a post-it note, as the publisher’s representative asks so an author doesn’t have to guess or hear correctly how your name is spelled; Mark did something of a double-take when he read my name, and looked up at me. We shared a rush of remembered friendship, as Mark and I had exchanged letters years ago about his books and our lives. My sister Pamela had met him once during a visit she made to New York City. He knew my black Lab Noah, who readers of this blog will recall I have written about here. We had a pleasant reunion there on line, even while people behind may’ve been wondering about the hold-up. I look forward to reading his new novel, from Overlook Press, Paris in the Present Tense. I also went out of my way to find Carol Bruneau, whose publisher Nimbus brought her down from Halifax, Nova Scotia to promote her forthcoming short story collection, A Bird on Every Tree. In the early 2000s I published her first novel, A Purple Thread for Sky, about the enduring legacy of an old family quilt. Carol and I had a sweet reunion, talking about Canadian books and writing, and our mixed-up modern world. I’m reading the opening story in the new book, “The Race,” about a long distance swimming competition, and am reminded anew that Carol writes enormously enjoyable sentences. Her new book will officially be available in September, and can already be pre-ordered from the Canadian book chain, Chapters. I know many readers of this blog will savor her writing.

I got a lot of pictures over the three days of the Book Expo. Here are some of my favorites.

Read more

“Ghost Songs,” an Ode to Memory by Regina McBride

/0 Comments/in /by

The three of us in my household have all now read Ghost Songs, a fine and moving memoir by Regina McBride. Her book weaves together the elements of memory, fantasy, and spirit into a powerful read. The style was haunting and unique, flashing back and forth in time across her life. The coming of age story is compelling and sensitively told. She weaves her past and present poetically, combining the remembered anxiety of youth with her own personal search for answers about the tragic deaths of her parents. It’s an emotional journey presented to the reader with hope and the belief that living a creative life and holding onto one’s dreams is part of the discovery of who we are. I loved it and recommend it very highly.

Read more