Only in Japan: The Twitter Novel
Posted by Mariko Fujinaka in publishing social media trends on 8 February 2010
A while back I mentioned the popularity of cell phone novels in Japan, the land of the tiny and compact. Well, now the rage seems to be the Twitter novel. It’s probably not really possible to write an entire novel in 140 characters, even if they do happen to be information-packed Chinese characters, but it is certainly an interesting concept, and bully for the Japanese for trying! It is likely that most Twitter novelists serialize their novels.
Thinking about Franny and Zooey . . .
Posted by Erin Brown in authors on 2 February 2010
My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:
Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.
Candyfreak Steve Almond Jumps into the Self-publishing Fray
Posted by Mariko Fujinaka in Bookselling books events publishing self-publishing trends on 1 February 2010
Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak and My Life in Heavy Metal, among others, has taken publishing matters into his own hands. Though Almond is still a hot commodity (his Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life will be availble April 13, 2010), he found that one of his book ideas was not generating much interest with publishers. His idea was a book that could be flipped over and read in two directions. One side would offer short stories, and the other side would contain essays about writing. The title? This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey.
Serge Gainsbourg, French Songwriter Lost in Translation
Posted by Thomas Riggs in poetry world literature on 28 January 2010
Like many people in France last week, I went to the opening of Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), a film about Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), the French songwriter, provocateur, and cultural icon. It’s hard to imagine the American equivalent of Gainsbourg, who is as famous in his own country as Elvis Presley is in the United States. To describe his personality and public presence, I thought about combining Bob Dylan, Abby Hoffman, and Charles Bukowski, but any mélange of American personalities would lack the French sensibility of Gainsbourg and the French culture that he both embodied and challenged.
That Gainsbourg, an inventive and disturbing cultural force, was virtually unknown in the United States even during his lifetime reflects the cocooning effect of language. Gainsbourg sang literary and sometimes shocking lyrics and provoked traditional French citizens into a fury, but Americans, deaf to the French language, were left undisturbed and unaffected.
The Rumpus Turns 1
Posted by Erin Brown in books events trends on 25 January 2010
Congratulations to The Rumpus, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary and, therewith, its “fitness for survival in the age of the interwebs.” Founded in San Francisco by Stephen Elliott, author of the much-acclaimed Adderall Diaries, The Rumpus is a relatively edgy magazine seeking to offer fresh coverage of books, music, art, comics, politics, film . . . and sex. From their statement of purpose:
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