In major BEA news, we're happy to
report that PGW is putting on its traditional blowout Saturday party.
Co-hosted by Grove/Atlantic, New World Library, Avalon Travel
Publishing, Gallup Press and other PGW clients, the party will be held
at the newly refurbished Gramercy Theater at 127 E. 23rd St., near
Lexington Ave. Headliners are Sharon Jones--known variously as "female
James Brown," "the Queen of Funk" and Soul Sister #1--and the
Dap-Kings. Doors open at 8:30; music starts at 9:30.
As usual, each invitation admits two. To get an invite, go to PGW's booth, # 4211.
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The Charlotte Observer lists the finalists for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance's 2007 Book Awards, which honor the best of Southern fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children, and, of course, cookbooks, including Deep South Parties: Or, How to Survive the Southern Cocktail Hour Without a Box of French-Onion Soup Mix, a Block of Processed Cheese, or a Cocktail Weenie by Robert St. John. Winners will be announced in June.
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Despite recent evidence to the contrary, the writing and reading of books "perseveres," according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover, who "sat in on the spiels of several publishers' sales reps as they pitched their companies' upcoming titles to Joseph-Beth bookstore staff members."
Hoover discovered that publishers' reps are "no different from the peddlers of Viagra, sump pumps or beer. . . . Their product is different, though." Or maybe he discovered the reps are different, since he also wrote, "these peddlers clearly loved what they were selling--simply books--and their enthusiasm was an effective antidote to all of the moaning and hand-wringing lately."
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Have men abandoned fiction? The Kansas City Star spoke with authors Jennifer Weiner and Laura Moriarty about their success with an almost exclusively female readership.
"I’ve had to get over it," Moriarty said. "I think I resisted being typed as a 'woman author.' But if I write something and thousands and thousands of people read it, who cares?"
Weiner added that "what I’m seeing at fiction readings, and not just mine, are audiences made up almost entirely of women. I’m really grateful from a purely personal point of view. But it is strange to think men have abandoned fiction and women have ceded the rest of the culture."
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On Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world are two writers, Nora Roberts and David Mitchell.
Concerning Roberts, Time wrote, "Nora Roberts is to love as
Masters and Johnson are to sex. As the world's leading romance writer,
she has inspected, dissected, deconstructed, explored, explained and
extolled the passions of the human heart since 1981. Millions of
devoted (primarily, but not exclusively, female) readers have had their
fantasy lives shaped by her work; she can make romance seem fresh and
hopeful every time. And there have been many, many times. At 56, she
makes her fellow authors look like slackers, having written 175 novels,
the majority of them best sellers. There are nearly 300 million copies
of her books in print. Befitting her career choice, Roberts fell in
love with and married a carpenter who went to do some work on her
house. And they lived happily ever after. The end."
As for Mitchell, who has been shortlisted for the Booker for three of
his four novels, Pico Iyer wrote in Time: "David Mitchell served notice that he
would be remaking the traditional novel when his first book, Ghostwritten,
published in 1999 just after he turned 30, ingeniously braided together
nine stories in eight countries and suggested that the same unchanging
spirit ran through its central characters, whether in Hong Kong, St.
Petersburg or a New York City radio station. Forget multiculturalism:
this was novel globalism and an inquiry into what the
boundary-dissolving author called transmigration.
"Having created the 21st century novel with months to spare, Mitchell
followed it up with a whole book in the voice of a Japanese 20-year-old
and then, lest we get too settled, cooked up a Möbius strip of a
narrative, Cloud Atlas, which begins in Melville's South Seas
(rendered in vigorous 19th century pastiche), travels to a chilling
next-generation North Korea and ends up in a post-apocalyptic
world--only to circle back again, in reverse, to the 19th century
Pacific.
"That virtuosity tempts critics to place Mitchell next to such modern
revolutionaries as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. But he is
tilling his own distinctive field, drawing from the U.S. (Paul Auster),
England (Martin Amis) and Japan (Haruki Murakami) to nurture something
entirely original and strangely rooted. His fourth novel, Black Swan Green, threw together ferocious language, a character from Cloud Atlas
and a hypercharged imagination to light up from within the travails of
an ordinary 13-year-old boy in England in 1982. The ultimate magician's
trick: to make one believe there's no trick--and not even a magician."