Month: April 2005

The Associated Press has just run a piece about the LBC‘s plans for its Read This! selection.

While he won’t reveal the inaugural nominees (there are five) until after May 15, he said that they include a novel in translation, experimental fiction and a graphic novel. Two of the books are from major publishing houses and three are from “pretty small houses,” including Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press.

“I’m absolutely delighted,” Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash wrote in an e-mail. “The Lit Blogs are now doing what e-mail and the Web couldn’t pull off: connect writers to readers more smoothly.”

Should the Soft Skull book be selected, he added, “we’ll go to town promoting it” and the literary blogging community.

Another nominee is published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House. Senior publicist Michiko Clark said that, while Pantheon is very excited to be among the picks, the house is taking a wait and see attitude.

Only another four weeks to go before the announcement. Should be fun.

The savvy Susannah Breslin takes a fresh approach to the sale of her book, Porn Happy.

Lately, I’ve been on the hunt for a literary agent for Porn Happy. I like to think of it as akin to a goldfish swimming amidst the sharks. Although, it’s only a game, after all. When I was a freelance writer and TV pundit in Los Angeles, I never had an agent. It seemed like one too many pieces of luggage; I already had so much baggage. I don’t like doing things how they’re supposed to be done.

Read the rest here.

I received notice that the new Loggernaut Reading Series will launch today, Thursday April 14th at 7:30 pm at Gravy (3957 N. Mississippi). Charles D’Ambrosio, Alicia Cohen, and Chelsey Johnson will be reading fiction and poetry that responds, in some way to the word “Cruelty.” (Should be interesting!) Cocktails and other beverages will be available for swilling at the bar. Admission is $2.

Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer, who earlier this earlier was convicted of blasphemy in Greece for a comic book that portrays Jesus as a pot-smoking hippie, and who was given a 6-month suspended prison sentence for “maliciously insulting the Orthodox Church” has had his conviction overturned on appeal.

“He has been cleared and the book is no longer banned,” Haderer’s lawyer, Maria Marazioti, said. “We all agreed it’s not something that special to have the book published in the Greek market, and that the artist had no intention to insult Christianity. Everyone understood that, even the priests.”

The three-member court was unanimous in its ruling.

That’s a relief.

I knew that The Confessions of Max Tivoli was one of my favorite books of last year when I started to give copies of it away to friends. At a cover price of $23, it was getting to be an expensive habit. But now that it’s out in paperback, I may be able to indulge in compulsive gifting once again.

The novel tells the story of Max Tivoli, born with the physical attributes of an old man–wrinkled skin, bald head, and liver spots. As he ages, he grows more youthful in appearance, so that, at the age of fourteen, he appears to be a man in his fifties; in his thirties, his physical and inner age coincide, however briefly; and then, in his fifties, he looks like a teenager, with pimples and a changing voice.

Max’s condition forces him into a lonely, difficult existence, made bearable only by the friendship of his tutor’s son, Hughie, and by the love he feels for young Alice, whom he meets as a teenager. But Max’s appearance makes it impossible for him to pursue Alice, to whom he appears as a drooling Humbert. Still, when their paths cross again, years later, Max looks closer to his real age, and now he can dare to have hope that Alice might notice him. “We are each the love of someone’s life,” he says early on in his journal, and this truth is given its full share of exploration in the novel.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a book like no other–a mix of sci-fi, love story, and classic tragedy, but it’s done so brilliantly that I simply couldn’t put it down. And it has such beautiful prose that I found myself re-reading sentences and underlining entire paragraphs. I recommend it unreservedly.

This time, from Inside Higher Ed. Scott McLemee talks to Dan Green about the LBC‘s goals.