Books I’ve brought out as publisher; essays and reviews I’ve published

“Hono(u)rary Canadian”–My New Blog

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Perce-Roche-tumbler6Along with The Great Gray Bridge, which is designed and built* upon a WordPress theme, I maintain a blog–currently on tumblr–where I share briefly written posts with photos and quick hits. It’s often handy when I’m traveling or running around town, away from my desk.** That site was formerly named after this blog, but I’m officially refocusing it–its emphasis will now be on Canadian content and covering Canadian issues. I’m renaming it Hono(u)rary Canadian, in a bid for transnational wit. I make no singular claim to that title, for I know that Canada draws interest and affection from many in the US. I use it though, as kindly Canadians have said it about me, and because I do cherish a near-lifelong deep and personal connection with Canada. In fact, from the time I began The Great Gray in October 2011, Canada has played an important role in my coverage, constituting roughly 20-30% of my writing, links, and sharing. I’ve connected with many Canadian readers over the past two years, and have found there many Facebook friends and Twitter followers. I’m hoping to connect with even more Canadian readers with the newly named site, and more deeply.

Given my interest in Canadian literature, authors, indie music, geography, and politics–and the enjoyment I find in writing about them, this is a natural extension for me. I also plan to write about Canada’s next federal election, which will take place no later than 2015. I’ll also be sharing photos from my many years of travel in Canada, beginning with the image that I’ve chosen as the signature visual for the site. It shows the monumental Roche Percé or ‘pierced rock’ on the Gaspé Peninsula in the most eastern portion of Quebec. I visited the region on a solo vacation in the autumn of 1988. The mighty rock juts in to the Atlantic Ocean with its massive pointed prow facing toward shore. It is a wonder of the world, no kidding. A visitor can only get near it at low tide, as I did on one lucky occasion. I remember spending about 3 hours scampering in and out of the surf and trying to get as close as possible to the pierced opening, with the huge bulk of it towering at least a hundred feet above me. The image at the bottom of the post is a ‘selfie’ I took the same day, long before that term was in the vernacular. It’s a place I hope to see again someday, next time with my family.

I invite you to visit Hono(u)rary Canadian in the days, weeks, and months to come. I’ll post on both sites, share often between them, and do lots of cross-linking. My interest in reading, book culture, live music, city life, media, and current events, and my writing about them–covering New York City, the US, and Canada–is growing so that I need the two sites. Thanks for reading me at one or both of them.

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* My excellent designer, who adapted the WordPress theme I chose for this site, is Harry Candelario, who when I first met him was known as the Mac Doctor, for his work on Apple products. I frequently suggest him to people when they ask me to recommend a web designer. I should add he also offers helpful advice about WordPress, various Web platforms, SEO, and generally helps to increases one’s Web savvy.
** Though I may soon convert it from tumblr to WordPress.

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Inmate Journalists and the Truths Their Books Reveal About Prison Life

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July 24 Update: Wilbert Rideau, whom I wrote about below, recently published an Op-Ed in the NY Times, “When Prisoners Protest.”
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As indicated by my mini-barrage of tweets yesterday, I was pleased to read in  this NY Times article that Angola Prison in Louisiana recently provided historical materials and artifacts to the Smithsonian’s National African American Museum of History & Culture, to be located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  Curators plan to actually rebuild a guard tower and inmate cell as an exhibit in the museum. Patricia Cohen’s story also examines Angola’s fraught racial history, in which it served as a kind of instrument for Jim Crow-era justice. More recently, prison officials have shown a willingness to let its record be examined, certainly more than similar penal institutions, opening a museum just outside their gates and working with the Smithsonian. I know about Angola Prison because inmates there publish an excellent newspaper called The Angolite that has won national media awards. Its editor-in-chief was Wilbert Rideau, an Angola inmate whose first trial led to a conviction and death sentence for his role in a robbery that led to the death of a bank teller. He spent eleven years on Death Row. In subsequent trials his capital sentence was reduced to life in prison. In 1975 he began working on The Angolite. In 1992, he and fellow inmate editor Rob Wikberg published Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars with Times Books at Random House, where I began working five years later, in ’97.AngolaLife Sentences back cover

One of the first titles I acquired after arriving at Times Books–a book to which William Styron would then contribute a powerful Introduction–was Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton & Life on Death Row by Joe Jackson and William F. Burke. Protagonist Stockton was a convict on Death Row in Virginia, who kept a diary in the run-up to the mass escape of six fellow inmates. His diary became a source to Dead Run co-author Burke, then a reporter at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Thus, Stockton became a kind of inmate journalist, or as is said now, a citizen journalist. Because Life Sentences, drawn largely from the files and pages of the Angolite, had already sold well–I got the copy photographed below in ’97, with a copyright page which shows that even then the title had already gone through seven printings–my senior colleagues gave the nod to me acquiring Dead Run with alacrity. It received many prominent endorsements and reviews, including one in The Angolite (“Unlike other books by inmates, employees, or outsiders, Dead Run provides an authentic verified, objective view of the prison world.”). It sold pretty well in hardcover (selling about 8,000 copies) and Walker & Company published it in trade paper, with a great jacket (below). I chronicled the story of how I got Styron involved in championing the book with me in an essay I published in the BN Review, almost two years ago. The writing and publication of that personal essay led directly to my decision to create a personal blog, what became The Great Gray Bridge. The day before Halloween in 2011, I titled one of my first posts My Encounter with William Styron.Dead Run backDead Run inside frontDead Run front

In 1993 LIFE magazine had dubbed Wilbert Rideau “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.” By then, he had already served longer than any comparable Angola inmate. He was finally released in 2005, after 44 years of incarceration, following a fourth trial in which he was judged guilty of manslaughter. His sentence on that conviction was 21 years, far less than what he’d already served.  Upon his release Rideau set out to write a memoir. Then Executive Editor with Carroll & Graf of Avalon Publishing Group, and known for publishing prison titles, I was on the submission list of possible acquiring editors for his representative, Washington D.C. attorney Robert Barnett.  Offered the opportunity to meet with Wilbert during his face-to-face publisher meetings, we did invite him to our 17th Street office in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. I recall that Wilbert came with his co-writer/partner Linda LaBranche. I found him a calm and self-possessed man, with a quick wit and an eagerness to meet my eye. I remember proudly telling Wilbert that one of the main reasons I had begun acquiring, editing, and publishing prison books, and books about miscarriages of justice, and plights of the wrongfully accused, was because of the early success of his first book, Life Sentences. 

We did bid for the rights to Wilbert’s book, putting together what was for Avalon a rather aggressive offer, but it was unavailing. Knopf got the book and in 2010 they published In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. I see that it’s available in trade paper, ebook, etc., and got great reviews. Next to the cover is a photo of Wilbert flanked by Robert Barnett and Ted Koppel. Other important works that Wilbert has created, or cooperated in the creation of, include “The Farm,” for which he was co-director, and independent radio producer David Isay’s portrait, “Tossing Away the Keys.”In the Place of Justice Rideau, Barnett, Koppel

Please note: All the book links in this blog post are live and go to the website of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, if you want to buy Life Sentences, Dead Run, or In Place of Justice. Under an arrangement I’ve made with Powell’s they return a portion of your purchase price to help me maintain this website. 

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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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Still More to Learn about Corporations’ Complicity with the Third Reich

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July 3 Update: Owing to the NY Times article I cited on first publication of this post, Publishers Weekly reports today that Harvard University Press has moved up by two weeks the release date of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. I’m pleased to see so much early momentum gathering for this important book.
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In 2000, while an editor at Crown Publishing, I acquired a book that later became an international sensation and a bestseller in the US. It was IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black. I believed it was imperative that the book be published because it documented hitherto unknown revelations such as the fact that IBM’s punch card tabulation system was licensed to the Third Reich which then used the technology to catalog and keep track of Jews and others under its rule they deemed undesirables. Turned out that corporate complicity with Hitler was as American as cherry pie.IBM

In the years since Black’s book was published, I’ve seen a lot of other histories of the Third Reich, but few have struck me as packing the same historical punch as the book on IBM. Until today, that is. Reading the NY Times on the web, I saw this headline, “Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis,” tipping an article about a forthcoming book,  The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand, a 35-year old historian from Australia. The story by Jennifer Schuessler reports Urwand has found copious documentation showing how very willing Hollywood executives were to make their movies in ways that would please Nazi officials, including Hitler himself. Some of these execs were Jewish, but they cooperated anyway. The Times reports that in Urwand’s book,

9780674724747“On page after page, he shows studio bosses, many of them Jewish immigrants, cutting films scene by scene to suit Nazi officials; producing material that could be seamlessly repurposed in Nazi propaganda films; and, according to one document, helping to finance the manufacture of German armaments.”

Urwand also found that Jack Warner, of Warner Bros., personally ordered that the word ‘Jew’ be removed from all dialogue in the 1937 film ‘The Life of Emile Zola,’ which focused on Zola’s defense of the persecuted Jewish soldier, Alfred Dreyfus. Mr. Urwand writes that Warner Bros. was the first studio to invite Nazi officials to its Los Angeles headquarters to screen films and suggest cuts. . . . ‘There’s a whole myth that Warner Brothers were crusaders against fascism,’ Mr. Urwand said. ‘But they were the first to try to appease the Nazis in 1933.’”

The cooperation, or as the author insists, collaboration, continued until well after Kristallnacht in November 1938. He found evidence that in December 1938, MGM was financing German armament production as part of a deal to circumvent restrictions on repatriating movie profits, according to the Times, which adds, “Urwand said that he found nearly 20 films intended for American audiences that German officials significantly altered or squelched. Perhaps more important, he added, Jewish characters were all but eliminated from Hollywood movies.”

I’m eager to read Urwand’s book when it comes out in October from Harvard University Press, and in the meantime I recommend you read Schuessler’s story. There’s also been early coverage of Urwand’s book in Tablet magazine in an article by David Mikics. And here’s video of Urwand talking about his book:

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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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“Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology” Morphing into a Magazine

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rustbelt112912Readers of this blog may recall the contribution I made last year to the book Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” a personal essay about a bluesman I followed avidly all the years I lived in my hometown. Now, less than a year after the book’s release, the enterprise has gone so well that the editors of the collection are planning to create an an online magazine, Belt, that will expand the concept of the book in to a continuing forum for writing about Cleveland, and more broadly, the Industrial Midwest. Co-editor Anne Trubek has announced a Kickstarter campaign to which I will make a contribution, and I encourage you to consider doing the same. With three weeks to go before their deadline they’ve already gained pledges that take them to more than half of their $5,000 goal. Like me, you’re probably receiving a lot of requests like this these days–this is definitely one worth offering your support. Here’s a link to the Kickstarter page with a video about Belt. 2 Mr Stress album cover

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Peter Workman, Successful Independent Publisher, Gone at 74

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I knew Peter Workman, founder of Workman Publishing, who died last Sunday at age 74. I started ordering Workman titles from him and his sales reps in 1978, when I opened a bookstore. The past 5 years Peter and I were fellow members of the same monthly lunch club. He last attended one of our luncheons last November, after which he missed the next month and we learned he’d become ill. He never rejoined us. Peter’s company was one of the most successful independently owned publishers of our time.I’ve been tweeting and sharing about him since Sunday. Here’s a selection of my timeline since then.

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A Belated #FridayReads–for April 5

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I’ve had such a busy couple days that I neglected to post a #FridayReads this week as is my usual custom. Still, I’ve been reading some good things, so here’s a belated rundown on them.

“The Meaning of White,” a personal essay by Emily Urquhart on her young daughter’s albino condition published in the April issue of The Walrus magazine, an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Beyond the Pale.

Siege 13 by Tama Dobozy, an amazing collection of interlinked short stories revolving around Hungary, its history, and its far-flung tribe. I’d made this a #FridayReads back on February 22, and am still savoring the stories, such as “The Atlas of B. Gorbe,” about a legendary childrens’ book illustrator living in NYC, and a sulking narrator who tries to befriend him. After posting about it in February, I heard from my friend, designer Michel Vrana, that he’d designed the evocative jacket, which I’m glad to show again here. siege13-web

Also reading a couple of promising manuscripts submitted to me for consideration from possible author clients–a novel for middle grade students with a funny, gross-out plot, and a novel by a South Asian writer.

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