#FridayReads–Barry Lancet’s Thriller, “Japantown” & Dan Richter’s “The Dream is Over,” Memoir of the 60s

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Japantown#FridayReads, Jan 31–Barry Lancet’s thriller, Japantown and Dan Richter’s The Dream is Over, a memoir of the 60s.

I’d made Japantown my #FridayReads last weekend, when I had read only about 140 pages of the nearly 400-page fast-paced international thriller. The rest of the book was every bit as riveting, and overall, hugely enjoyable. I liked it so much that, on Wednesday night, heading out to hear live music–I stowed the hardcover book in my knapsack, along with my handy bike flashlight–and read deep in to its last chapters between sets in the dimly lit music room at Pianos, inching toward the suspenseful climax which I reached the following morning. Here’s an abbreviated version of the plot rundown from my post last week:

“The book is at first set in San Francisco where protagonist Jim Brodie works as a dealer in Asian antiquities, while also maintaining connections with the private detective agency his late father founded and ran in Tokyo. Brodie’s widowed, a single dad living with his grade school-age daughter, Jenny. Brodie is the new go-to-guy when the San Francisco Police Department find itself investigating a grisly mass murder with Japanese victims and Japanese cultural characteristics. At the crime scene, Brodie finds only one clue, a paper artifact emblazoned with an obscure written character (kanji in Japanese). Brodie doesn’t realize, though the reader sees, that even as he surveys the scene of the brutal killing he and his Homicide Dept confidant are being surveilled with lenses and cameras by unknown agents. Though not understanding the full extent of the danger he’s in, Brodie senses he’s being watched, at his gallery and even at home with Jenny. With the obscure kanji in hand, Brodie undertakes an investigative trip to Japan, first putting Jenny in to the protective embrace of a police safe house. Once in Japan, the malign forces behind the killings begin taking aim at Brodie and his trusted Japanese colleagues.”

Good set-up, huh? Trust me, it’s much more exciting than my synopsis. After finishing Lancet’s totally satisfying thriller, I’m really excited he’s working on another book set in Jim Brodie’s world.

After finishing Japantown, I needed a nonfiction tonic and so picked up  The Dream is Over, Dan Richter’s personal account of London in the ’60s, his friendship with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and his struggles with addiction. Richter’s book, released in hardcover in Britain in 2012, carries a Foreword by Yoko. I met Dan in the early 2000s, when I edited and published his first book Moonwatcher’s Memoir–A Diary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dan was in his twenties, working as a mime actor, when Stanley Kubrick–searching for the right sort of performer to play the role of the marauding ape wielding a club in the opening scene of the 1968 intergalactic time travel epic–met Dan and cast him in the part. Working with Dan, I learned that he’d met Yoko in the ’60s through his theater work and her early works of performance art. Later, he would meet John Lennon through Yoko. His verbal accounts of those years were fascinating to hear about, so I’m delighted he’s written this second memoir. It focuses on 1969-73, when he was living in London, putting on poetry readings at the Albert Hall, and running with a literary set that included Alan Ginsberg, during his frequent visits to London, and Beat writer Alexander Trocchi, a bad-boy Scotsman who wrote Cain’s Book, a notorious and transgressive book in its time. Dan recently got in touch and asked if I might be able to help him find a US publisher for The Dream is Over, so I’m reading it as work and for the welcome evocation of a rich era that it paints. Characters who walk in and out of the narrative include Eric Clapton, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, the rebel psychiatrist R.D. Laing, members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I don’t know yet about the prospects for finding a US publisher, but I’m glad to be reading the book. I’ll try to post more about it once I’ve read more. The flap copy promises an intimate account of the making of the album “Imagine.”Moonwatcher's Memoir
Dream is Over

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J. Michael Orenduff’s POT THIEF Mysteries on Sale Today from Open Road

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J. Michael OrenduffReaders of this blog may recall that I’ve posted about author J. Michael Orenduff (l.), whom I represent as his literary agent. He’s written the delightful POT THIEF mystery series, which were an indie- and self-publishing success beginning in 2009. Last year I licensed the six-book series to Open Road Integrated Media for new ebook and paperback editions. I’m happy to post today that the new POT THIEF editions have just gone on sale from Open Road, whose site leads to all the major ebook and brick & mortar booksellers, such as  Overdrive; GooglePlay; Indiebound and Amazon.

As a devoted mystery reader myself, I adored these books when I first read them in 2011. They’re set in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, featuring dealer in Native America pottery Hubie Schutz and his sidekick in sleuthing, wise-cracking Susannah Inchaustigui, a descendant of one of the region’s old-line Basque ranching families. They meet most afternoons at Hermanas Tortilleria, to sip margaritas and discuss their latest puzzler. After years running Undercover Books, a bookstore where I sold lots of mysteries, and as an editor publishing mysteries, I am especially excited that the many readers of Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries, also set in the American Southwest, will now also be able to discover the POT THIEF books. In their earlier editions the POT THIEF books won numerous awards and raves from mystery readers, including Anne Hillerman, the late mystery master’s daughter who’s recently revived the bestsellerdom of her father’s series with her own book, Spider Woman’s Daughter, featuring Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito. Hillerman said this about the sixth POT THIEF book:

“I inhaled this book. Witty, well-crafted and filled with unexpected plot turns, The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid will delight J. Michael Orenduff’s many fans—and win him new ones.”

If you haven’t yet heard of Open Road, please note they have more than 3000 active titles, including five books by my longtime author Ruth Gruber, as well as titles by dozens of important authors such as William Styron, Rachel Carson, Andre Dubus, Sherman Alexie, and Mary Glickman, always in digital editions, and sometimes in print editions, too. They’ve been operating for about five years, innovating and growing along with the emerging ebook market. The company was profiled last year in a profile at paidcontent.org.

If I were still running a bookstore, I would urge all my mystery-loving customers to read the POT THIEF books. Please click here to see Open Road’s new covers with their uniform look.Enjoy!

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Some of the Things that Happen When Modern Corporations Dismiss Employees

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pink-slipDismissed from Byliner, the digital publisher in the Bay Area, editor Will Blythe opines in the NY Times today on why he declined to sign a legal waiver from his company that included a non-disparagement clause. Doing so, he forfeited 2 weeks’ pay, something he was willing to do for the sake of free expression and his self-respect. Here’s one of the nubs in his good column:

“As quaint as this may seem, giving up the right to speak and write freely, even if that means speaking or writing negatively, strikes me as the unholiest of deals for a writer and an editor to accept. Though such clauses don’t technically violate the First Amendment — I’d be explicitly agreeing to forfeit my right to speak freely if I signed [the] clause—such a contract has a paralyzing effect on the dissemination of the truth, with all of truth’s caustically cleansing powers. To disparage is but one tool in a writer’s kit, but it’s an essential one. That a company would offer money for my silence, which is what this boils down to — well, I’ve seen many a mob movie about exactly that exchange.”

Blythe’s column reminded me of when I was laid off by Sterling Publishing in January 2009, at what felt like the very bottom of the recession, an event I first wrote about in a personal essay called Three Years Ago Today, later republished at the website Over 50 and Out of Work while a condensed version of it appeared in print magazine NY UnderScore‘s Work issue. My bad news came a few days before President Obama’s 1st inaugural, oddly solving a dilemma I’d been pondering–of where and how I was going to observe the historic occasion. At least I got to watch it at home with my wife, some small comfort that dark week.

Similar to Byliner and its Department of Human Resources (some Orwellian label that one), Sterling’s HR director presented me with a waiver to consider. Mine, if signed, would produce a severance of salary and health insurance for 6 months. I had 3 weeks to decide if I would sign. Going farther than Blythe relates in his case, the waiver drafted for me from Sterling’s parent company Barnes&Noble required that I agree to quit any claims of wrongful dismissal based on age discrimination or for any other reason.

Thing is, there was a rub to that last point…

About six months earlier, during the summer of 2008, I had happened to receive via inter-office mail a memorandum generated by Sterling’s HR department that circumstantially placed me in a disfavored position relative to another employee, a junior colleague. Weird that I was even been on the distribution list for the memo, with its cryptic note about me at the bottom of it. I had quickly shown it to my supervisor and asked if he could give me an explanation for it. He was flustered and hollowly claimed it meant nothing at all, adding that it surely didn’t mean my status at the company was weakened in any way, relative to this younger colleague, or for any other reason. I persisted and since it had come from HR, I asked if we could speak with the director about it, or if he would. He said he’d talk with her and came back to me, again denying that the cryptic wording had any significance. From that point, I felt very unsure of my footing at the company.

I was very uneasy during the long holiday break of 2008-09. Lehman Brothers had collapsed in September and though President Obama was soon be inaugurated, I was terribly uneasy about what he was inheriting, what the economy would be like in the new year, and with layoffs in publishing having begun in late 2008–when longtime industry contacts such as Janice Goldklang were let go, in her case by Knopf–I worried I would lose my job, too. Soon after the end of vacation, on the morning of January 14, 2009, the same pair summoned me to the office of the HR director. They told me I was being let go. Hardly surprised, I was still shocked. Within a minute or two of hearing what they said, I thought of the mysterious memo I was still holding; if they’d thought back to the summer, they would’ve remembered that I brought it up months earlier and had been dissatisfied with their response. I thought, Good thing I have multiple copies of it in my personal files.

Handing me a folder, the HR director mentioned the details of the severance offer, and that there was a waiver they hoped I would sign, all enclosed in the packet. She finished, saying I should return to my office, pack up my stuff, and prepare to leave the building in no more than a couple hours. Anything I couldn’t pack then, they would ship to me at their expense (I remember being puzzled if she added that last bit because she believed I would find it magnanimous.) Numbly returning to my office one floor below, my computer access and company email had already been dissolved. That part of the experience–being suddenly cut off from my entire 2-year digital archive of work as Editorial Director of Sterling’s imprint of topical nonfiction, Union Square Press was, among other things, deeply disrespectful to the books and authors I left behind. But B&N, as a bookseller, and not really a publisher, didn’t care about that. Nor did Sterling–which is more of a pity. B&N had bought them in the early 2000s, a publisher of illustrated books, DIY, imports, packages, childrens books–it wasn’t a very heady list. They’d never developed a strong tradition of author cultivation.  In the weeks immediately following my layoff I found the cutoff from the archive almost the most distressing thing. I was cut off, not only a non-person at Sterling, but maybe also in the book industry. That sudden alienation from one’s professional class was so disturbing over many months that when Over 50 and Out of Work was going to reprint Three Years Ago Today the editor of the site retitled it Warding off the “Demons of Disemployment,” a phrase I used when she interviewed me on the phone.

How working at a publicly-traded corporation is different than working at other companies

I’ve observed in my case, and later mass layoffs there, that it’s B&N’s custom to barely confirm to book industry news outlets when these nasty episodes occur. B&N’s aversion to coverage in these instances, and in other areas, is a decided part of its corporate culture. When my Sterling tenure began in 2007, one of the assets I thought I was bringing the company was that quite often my books, beginning when I signed them up, not just when they were published, would get a lot of early coverage. This became especially true in the early 2000s, when the Internet began changing the way I worked as a book editor, allowing me to publicly cultivate a professional reputation as a keen-eyed and proactive editor who wanted to publish ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ titles by such public figures as Susan MacDougal, jailed during Whitewater, with whom I edited and published THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN’T TALK: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail (2002) a New York Times bestseller; Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Plame, endured the leaking of her CIA status by multiple members of the Bush administration, after which Joe and I connected and he wrote THE POLITICS OF TRUTH: Inside the Lies that Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (2004), a New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller that later became the basis in part for the film, “Fair Game”; and Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, who as head of the UN’s peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 2003-04, urged a more robust force that would have probably pre-empted the genocide that followed, in which mroe than 800,000 people died, even while he and his small force saved more than 25,000 displaced persons. In 2006, I published his book, then already a Canadian bestseller,  SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, with a new Introduction by Samantha Power, a Washington Post bestseller.

About my editorial mission, I wrote in my professional bio at the time that I seek to publish books

“By and about truthtellers, whistleblowers, muckrakers, revisionist historians, and singular witnesses–people who’ve been through some crucible of experience that’s made them the only one who could tell that story, giving  them elevated author-ity and enhanced credibility to readers.”

With the growth of the Web in the early and mid-2000s–even though there was no social media yet–I was able to begin reporting my book acquisitions and developments about my authors. One of the very first places was the website created by Michael Cader, with whom I spent time at a conference in 2000, just as he was beginning Publishers Lunch, his website now known more broadly as PublishersMarkletplace.com. I was kind of a charter member there, on the site from the very beginning, reporting my new book acquisitions in the daily deal reports. I did that over my entire seven-year tenure with Carroll&Graf of Avalon Publishing Group, a job I left as editor-in-chief in the last weeks of 2006. Arriving at Sterling a few weeks later in the first weeks of 2007, I learned right away that I would be asked to clear all announcement of new book deals and news about my books through Sterling’s publicity department, and thence through B&N’s corporate PR department, before I could have approval to send out the announcement or news. Over time, it got worse–the senior person in Sterling’s publicity department finally told me B&N really didn’t want me to announce any more new book deals.

I believe the aversion of B&N management to publicity–its opaque default–may be rooted in the company’s status as a publicly-traded corporation, with investors to whom they periodically report and stock that goes up and down every day. Managers seemed motivated to minimize anything, including Web mentions of important new nonfiction books that might lead to additional coverage, stirring up controversy that could somehow jiggle the stock price. They acted as if, in managing the company they were custodians of a delicate patient, a body that shouldn’t be disturbed often. With such a blank public face, word of my dismissal among Sterling colleagues, and that of others let go the same day–some from Sterling and some from B&N itself–traveled only by hushed word-of-mouth.

I’ve observed that when people are forced like this to leave a company within hours of their hushed termination, it’s like a scandalous death in the family, dealing a terrible disservice to departing employees. Publishing colleagues outside of Sterling did learn of it within a day or two, but not because of any corporate communications by B&N. I spoke with the blog Moby Lives and they ran a news item the next day, Mass Firings at BN*. By contrast, other publishing companies, including HarperCollins, which I wrote about in a 2012 post called If It Must Be Done–A Model for Laying Off People Decently, have openly named and thanked people being dismissed, a much healthier practice.

Exploring my legal options and making a decision…

Once I soberly considered the severance offer and read and re-read the waiver, and began discussing it with my family, a part of me believed the company was basically trying to get me to acquiesce to having been discriminated against on the basis of my age. I reminded the HR director of the mysterious memo from the summer before and again asked for an explanation, especially now in light of my termination. Her responses were just as unilluminating as before. I persisted, saying I now believed it likely that the decision to dismiss me had been at least in part related to my age (54 at the time). She denied this. I wondered if the language disclaiming age discrimination in my waiver had been bulked up in my version of it. I tried negotiating for improved terms on the severance, but I got nowhere with that request. When I called to ask a question, or press a point she clearly had little time for it, or me. From the corporation, the message was clear: “Sign the waiver and take the offer, or don’t. You are free to walk away. Just tell us your decision.”

Affronted by what at minimum were obvious prevarications by my former colleagues–and smarting personally from the layoff, even with it coming amid the much wider collapse–I visited a lawyer to explore my options. He examined the record, and agreed it was all very odd, but reminded me how hard it could be to get satisfaction, or justice, if I sued. He suggested I consult with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), whose charter explains that it is “responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.” I visited the NY office in lower Manhattan and met with a staff attorney who sat under a photo portrait of President Obama, one that could’ve been hung on the wall only a few days earlier. Taking time to hear me and read the record I showed him, he actually raised an eyebrow and commented that in his professional judgment I probably had a case of age discrimination and wrongful termination, and that he and the agency would help me pursue it if I chose to do so. However, he too added that pursuing my claim to its conclusion could take 2-3 years, with no definite outcome. Ultimately, amid the worst economic climate of my lifetime, I decided to sign the waiver and accept the severance. I ached for justice, and still do, but it just wasn’t prudent to pursue it. That’s the way the corporation wanted to me to feel. I’ll add that though I didn’t ask the EEOC to help me pursue my claim, I am very glad that this excellent agency exists as part of of the federal government.

One thing that Will Blythe’s column and my experience illustrate is the blight that today’s HR mindset casts on our culture, full of its own hermetic vocabulary, with bland euphemisms, opaque acronyms, and inhumane doublespeak. I hope Blythe’s access to his computer was not shut off the same instant he got his layoff notice, and that he was given more than a few hours to vacate his office. Shunning and banishment are two of the signature modes of behavior in the HR-ization of modern life.. I respect Blythe for making the decision he did, though two weeks’ pay is a lot different than six months’ worth of pay and health insurance. Looking back on my decision nearly 5 years ago, I’m convinced the company that formerly employed me got off very cheaply.

* Trying to get better link for this from Melville House/Moby Lives

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A Basket Full of Holiday #FridayReads

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PT #FridayReads photoDelighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
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My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.


Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.


I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.


I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.

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Jeff Stein Visits Lara Logan’s Husband at Home

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November 26 Update:

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik just reported on their hourly news bulletin that Lara Logan and the producer of the botched “60 Minutes” segment on Benghazi have been put on a leave of absence for the many misjudgments they made in producing writing that piece for the show. More to come . . .

 

Kudos to Jeff Stein, veteran national security and intelligence reporter, for his important Newsweek story, “Lara Logan’s Mystery Man”. He explores what may have motivated Logan to so badly mis-report her “60 Minutes” story on Benghazi which was built upon the contributions of a source who claimed to be an eyewitness to events it is now understood he couldn’t have seen. Almost immediately after the October 27 airing of the segment, critics began questioning the CBS broadcast, but it took the network several days to even acknowledge any problems with the story, and then finally disown it, with a brief and unrevealing Logan apology on air two weeks later.

Most significantly, judging from Stein’s article, he managed to speak with Logan’s husband, the mystery man of Stein’s title, whose background includes a stint with the Lincoln Group, a company that the Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld, hired to supply fake positive news during the Iraq War. I relish the vision of Stein talking his way past Logan & Burkett’s front door, before, I assume, he was asked to leave. I recommend you read Stein’s whole story, but here’s the final portion as a sample:

“So why did Logan put that story on the air? Her pro-military bias is as well known, but so is her mettle – she’s worked in some of those most dangerous parts of war-ravaged Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, where she was sexually assaulted by a mob. She won an Emmy for one of her Iraq reports. In other words, she’s a smart, tough, experienced reporter. And the producer and writers and reporters who helped her put this Benghazi story together are honored, respected professionals, many of whom have been covering the region for years. Whoever fooled them, whoever convinced them that al Qaeda orchestrated that attack on the U.S. embassy, had to be smart, incredibly persuasive and savvy about the media. And unquotable. In other words, an intelligence source. And the person closest to Logan with those credentials is her husband. But he’s not talking.”

Did Burkett have an uncredited role in producing Logan’s story? Stein’s story makes me wonder. That would be a big deal.

The contrast between CBS’s veritable stonewalling on Logan’s flawed report, and their total repudiation of Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes II” story on George W. Bush’s National Guard records–which despite errors, actually had many accurate elements–is striking. In 2004, the network appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study what went awry and fired producer Mary Mapes. In the current instance, there’s been no public airing of what wrong, and no one, least of all Logan, has been dismissed or publicly criticized. There’s also been no public admission that “60 Minutes” has a corporate sibling relationship with Threshold Editions, the conservative book imprint at fellow Viacom company Simon & Schuster, that published (and then withdrew) the fraudulent “witness’s” book. Did Logan allow her personal agenda, or that of her husband John Burkett, to color her reporting? We may never know, unless and until CBS becomes more transparent on this troubling incident.

A bit of humor to close . . .

On a lighter note, I also have to give props to Jeff Stein for a keen cinematic reference in his story, likening John Burkett as a “puffer” to Steve McQueen’s character in “Solider in the Rain” (1963), with Jackie Gleason, based on the fine novel by William Goldman.

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Talking Transition–for Mayor de Blasio & NYC’s New Government–w/PEN America

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Support the Book EconomyAs a member of PEN America, I was invited to participate in a PEN speak-out Tuesday night that was part of Talking Transition, an event going on all week and next in Soho, providing input on policy and priorities to NYC’s incoming mayor Bill de Blasio, all citywide officeholders, and the new members of our City Council. Talking Transition is taking place in a big heated tent that’s set up on the north side of Canal Street, along Sixth Avenue. Each day this week has been devoted to a different topic–Tuesday night had an emphasis on Arts & Culture. PEN chose to devote its 90-minute slot to “Keeping NYC a literary and cultural capital.” On Twitter, you can follow transition events @TalkNYC2013 and the hashtag #TalkingTransition.

Each member who chose to speak was given just a 3-minute slot, so we really had to trim our points down to the minimum. The group was comprised of almost two dozen speakers, including several poets, administrators of poetry and literary programs, and publishing colleagues. The evening moved along with alacrity in front of a pretty good-sized audience under the big tent. This was the preliminary list of speakers, which came off with only a few small changes.PEN Speakout roster I titled my own talk “Support the Book Economy, Foster Publishing Experiments.” The transcript of my remarks, delivered almost verbatim, is here, and below them is a key point I would’ve made if I’d had a bit more time.

Support the Book Economy, Foster Publishing Experiments. 

When the recession hit in September 2008, the book economy in New York, was already in a parlous state. To choose just two measures, the rate of closure among indie bookstores was rising and the income of mid-list authors was declining, along with their access to being published at all. A few months later, in January 2009, I was swept out of corporate publishing when the imprint where I’d been editorial director was shuttered. Much as I could talk about my experiences over the past five years, the new business I started, or my three decades in the book business, this talk is not about me, for I am only one among 100s of publishing professionals who lost full time jobs in the months and years since the economic collapse who have yet to again find full employment. To get at the scale of the problem, consider that in 2009 Publishers Weekly started a “Comings & Goings” feature that allowed folks to submit their contact info so that others who wanted to be in touch, to hire them, or just to network, could do so. It had over 200 names at one point. And then last month another book news outlet, Media Bistro’s galleycat, created a directory of just freelance editors, which after a few weeks already has nearly 300 people in it. Based on my observations of book industry layoffs, I’m sure that these figures of self-selecting people only hint at the total numbers.

Clearly, there is still a wealth of great publishing talent in the city. That’s good news. And yet while many of us are still working as editors, marketers, and publicists, or working in adjacent fields like online news, often we are not being paid adequately, and sometimes not at all, for time spent on publishing tasks we hope will one day turn in to full time jobs or paying assignments. Regrettably, this condition persists even while the book industry has experienced a boom from digital reading that’s given greater exposure to book culture, increased the engagement of many readers, and left thousand of readers more avid for books, print and digital.

Yet, even while the boom has grown, the benefits of it are not being felt by most of the under-employed full time publishing workers. This crisis offers the city an opportunity to capitalize on the talents of all these bookpeople with publishing incubators that would foster innovation, experiments, and new models to help business-savvy bookpeople turn their enterprises and current projects in to job-creating engines of the book and the New York City economy.

Therefore, I urge City Council, Mayor-elect de Blasio, and all citywide officeholders to establish public-private partnerships and other initiatives that would help make available low-cost or no-cost business enterprise advice (legal, accounting, financing); no-cost or low-cost workspaces where people could share cubicles, WiFi, and conference rooms. With philanthropic support, or venture capitalists with money looking to do good, a fund for experiments could be launched, with grants being provided to offer recognition, encouragement, and a stipend. I urge the tech community, really a first cousin to digital publishing, to work with bookpeople to create new initiatives that will elevate the entrepreneurial efforts of New York City’s publishing community.

My addendum to these comments is an explicitly political point. One of the reasons that the economy remains anemic in New York City and around the country–with a lack of full employment for millions of people, not just publishing professionals–is that obstructionists in Congress have imposed austerity on the country. Since 2010, right-wing politicians have thwarted any ongoing economic stimulus that would, if enacted, help prime the pump and accelerate demand.  This has been denied us, even at a time of very low interest rates. Now, with the victories of Mayor-elect de Blasio, many progressive citywide officeholders, including by far the most progressive City Council since I moved to New York in 1985, I hope that the city, and my own precious book industry, can have, courtesy of the new actors in city government, its own local and direct stimulus that will benefit publishing, readers, authors, and all of New York City.

Finally, here are pictures I took Monday and Tuesday night when I attending Talking Transition events. PEN Participants had been asked to submit favorite quotations, our own, or those of other writers, which you’ll see in a tweet cloud in many of the photos.Please click here to view them.

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#FridayReads, Nov 8–Book Proposals & Manuscripts–Examining a Notorious Political Killing, Exploring the Paranormal, etc.

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#FridayReads, Nov 8–While I’m sure I’ll be reading a proper book or two this weekend, my reading this week has been dominated by work-related materials–nonfiction book proposals, fiction manuscripts and lots of promising queries on submission to me in my work as a literary agent, part of my publishing work. Here’s a rundown on some of what I’m looking at, only in generalities out of deference to the writers whose work I’m considering: 1) a proposal for a book that will explore the motive behind one of the most infamous consequential political crimes of the 20th century, while also one of its least examined; 2) a hardboiled crime novel about the theft of an election in a battleground midwestern state; 3) several works by a British scholar with a rigorous approach to unexplained phenomena involving the super- or even the paranormal; and 4) an original manuscript that includes the original heretofore unpublished memoir of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic, even weird, movie-making mogul.

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Eager to Read Peter Warner’s New Thriller “The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates”

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The picture in the above tweet shows the present and former chiefs of Thames & Hudson, the publishing company that Will Balliett (r.) heads up nowadays, and which author Peter Warner–here mulling his inscription for Will’s copy of Peter’s new book–ran for many years prior. Will and I were colleagues from 2000-06, when we both worked at Avalon Publishing Group. I was glad I could attend Peter ‘s launch party last week, as he is also a publishing friend of many years. His new novel, his third, is The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates, published Oct 22 with Thomas Dunne Books at St. Martin’s Press. It’s already had an excellent review in Washingtonian magazine. Calling the book “crafty,” critic John Wilwol added, “Warner knows Washington intimately, and he particularly nails the way that the right social access can lead to professional success.”The Mole

Peter has established a Tumblr blog where he’s sharing the documentary underpinnings of his novel, with such artifacts as photos of CIA directors Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, a U-2 spy plane, and Senator Richard Russell, the politician on whose staff title character Winston Bates serves. Captions on the blog are cleverly written from the persona and in the voice of Bates, an expat Canadian now working for Russell, who was in real life one of the most powerful figures in the US senate. Though I haven’t begun reading it yet, this novel, like several I’ve read in recent months, especially Jayne Anne Phillips Quiet Dell, is part of a genre I’ve begun calling “documentary fiction,” with books that draw on events, artifacts, and figures from history. To show the other, more imaginative side of his enterprise, Peter Warner has created a Facebook author page with postings about the creative underpinnings of the book. This comment of his caught my eye, as the proprietor of a sister blog to The Great Gray Bridge called  Honourary Canadian.

“My Personal Alternate History

In my last post I wrote about The Mole as a different take on the literary category of alternate history. But I think almost everyone has, in the back of his or her mind, an alternative life story that comes to mind on occasion: What if I had taken that job? What if I had made that investment? What if I had married that crazy person? In my case there is one alternate history that I share with almost every man of my generation: What if I had moved to Canada as a war resistor or to escape the draft during the Vietnam War era? There are also tens of thousands of American men, now Canadian citizens, who probably wonder: What if I hadn’t moved to Canada to avoid the draft? In my case, I was lucky to get a draft exemption after couple of years of anxiety. Subsequently, my publishing career took me to Canada at least twice a year for more than twenty years. I am sure having regular opportunities to imagine myself as a Canadian while in Canada played a part in the central plot of The Mole—that there might have been a Canadian “sleeper” at the heart of the American political establishment, doing his best (or worst) to undermine the so-called “American Century.” In Canada, I sometimes sensed in my friends a kind of ironic armor they had developed to accept (sometimes endure) that huge, well-intentioned, sometimes irrational, culturally inescapable, totally oblivious neighbor to the south. I hope Canadian readers will look at The Mole as a kind of delicious literary revenge.”

I did not have quite the same experience of the Vietnam era as Peter, since I am a bit younger than him, but my brother Joel, almost four years older than me, certainly did sweat the draft lottery along with millions of other older teenage boys in the US. One more connection that I found I have to The Mole is through a history book I published at Carroll & Graf in 2006, How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair & the Hunt for Soviet Spies, by Canadian historian Amy Knight. She chronicles the strange events involving Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cypher clerk who in 1945, while employed at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, walked away from his desk and defected to the West with a trove of secrets and information that indicated a Soviet spy network was then operating in North America. It became an international cause celebre, lasting for several years, with Gouzenko seeking and receiving permission to live in Canada. It was, for its day, an Edward Snowden-type event.

The intense publicity did eventually subside and about 20 years after his defection, Gouzenko actually appeared on Canadian TV, disguised by a hooded mask that had eyeholes cut out for him to see. To Americans, it looks instantly like a KKK hood, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t seen that way in Canada in 1965. Knight chronicles this as the all-too-amazing-to-be-true-but-is story that it was. Among the odd aspects of the incident was that Gouzenko, who somehow evaded the supervision at the embassy with his pregnant wife and their two-year old son, could not at first get any Canadian authorities to accept that he was an authentic defector. They ended up walking around Canada’s capitol city for more than 40 hours, finally being believed after first futilely visiting several Canadian government offices.* Occurring even before WWII had ended, the Gouzenko incident set off a cascade of frantic maneuvering among leaders of the USA, Canada, Soviet Union, and Britain, their intelligence services, and even our FBI. The countries were all nominally still allies, but this episode displayed the ill will and suspicion that would dominate the Cold War.Gouzenko photo

It is against that historical backdrop that a character like Peter Warner’s Winston Bates operates. All these personal connections to Peter Warner and The Mole have me eager and excited to begin reading his book.

*Via this link is a fascinating video of Gouzenko’s appearance on the CBC news program “Seven Days.” The first CBC host to speak is the great broadcaster Patrick Watson, later a novelist, who in 1979 visited Undercover Books, my bookstore, for a great in-store appearance promoting his novel Alter Ego, a kind of “Memento”–type story, written many years before that entertaining film was made.

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