The Olive Reader

As promised, here are photos from Sunday night. I’ll pepper some captions where needed. And thanks to the lovely Mara Lander for snapping the photos.

From l to r: Emily Maguire (Taming the Beast), Sarah Hall (Haweswater) and Heather O’Neill (Lullabies for LittleCriminals).

The Scene

Jackie Greenberg and Jeanette Perez

l to r: Sarah Weinman (GalleyCat and www.sarahweinman.com), myself, and a Harper Perennial gift bag.

l to r: Jeffrey Yamaguchi (52 Projects and Bookmouth) and Josh Kilmer Purcell (I Am Not Myself These Days)

More of the scene

Heather O’Neill

Sarah Hall

Emily Maguire

Sorry to all the wonderful bloggers that were not captured. KGB will have more pics tomorrow. Thanks to all:
Jason Boog of The Publishing Spot
Ron Hogan of GalleyCat and Beatrice.com
Ginny Wiehardt of fictionwriting.about.com
Rachel Fershleiser who runs Memoirville at SmithMag.net

Visit our MySpace page and make us your friend. It’s a well-known secret that we giveaway lots of books there. And by telling you this, I’m in no way bribing you into being our friend. But, so we’re clear, be our friend, get free books. Co-dependence.

You’ve probably heard of this place already, but in case you haven’t, it’s definitely worth a look — Paragraph is “a quiet place to write.” Apply, show up, and work in a writer-friendly environment. And (would you believe it?) they even have their own blog and reading series. Browsing through their pictures, I just spotted Grant Stoddard, author the forthcoming Harper Perennial novel, Working Stiff. Good things going on here.

Thanks to everyone who came to our Lit Chick event last night. I can attest for the Perennial team that we all had a great time (even JW). Heather O’Neill, Emily Maguire, and Sarah Hall were each impressive. Their voices, in a very positive way, resonated with one another, combining to create a memorable night at KGB Bar. Either tomorrow, or some day soon after that, we’ll have photos from the event. KGBBar Lit will have photos on Wednesday. For now you can read reviews of Taming the Beast and Haweswater (Lullabies for Little Criminals should be up on Wed).

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 25—The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation today named ten recipients of the 2006 Whiting Writers’ Awards. The awards, which are $40,000 each, totaling $400,000, have been given annually since 1985 to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise.

Click here for the full.

I just stumbled across this incredible item, so figured I should mention it. It’s the complete Penguins Classic library for sale on Amazon. More than a thousand books. The price? $7,989.50. That’s down from a list price of more than $13,000.

What I love is the mention of “free shipping.” At first, I thought — no kidding, free shipping. If I’m dropping eight grand on something, you’re getting it to my door at no extra cost. But then I looked at the shipping weight — 700 pounds — and figured maybe waiving the cost is a nice gesture after all.

The former book columnist for The Dallas Morning News now has a blog — book/daddy. He’s currently reading Brief Encounters With Che Guevara. I hope he likes it.

Also, there are still books available in the giveaway posted below. I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me by not immediately and vigorously responding, but if you want to take a look, or know someone who might, just send me an e-mail. How easy is that?

ALL CAPS…you know what that means! No? Well, it means we’re doing a giveaway and you’re invited. The first five, so be quick, readers to e-mail me at Michael.Signorelli@harpercollins.com will receive a complimentary copy of TWINS by Marcy Dermansky — the critically acclaimed debut novel from an award-winning short story writer. “Sometimes despairing, sometimes blackly humorous, always engrossing and thoroughly original. A wonderful debut” — Kirkus Reviews.

Here’s his latest music video — Jump in My Car. It’s no Hooked on a Feeling, but it’s nice to see that he is still out there making art.

Jess Walter, a nominee for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero, has a new story on FiveChapters.com.

Bud of Chekhov’s Mistress asks Is the blogroll dead?

An interview with Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. We’re fans.

Where Have You Gone, Edward Abbey?. “More than ever, America needs the ornery writer today.” Our new edition of the Monkey Wrench Gang will be available December 12th.

And I try my hand at reviewing books over at SmallSpiralNotebook.

…and we’d like to thank Brian Griffin for blogging all last week. He was excellent day in and day out. If you haven’t read his posts, they’re like three inches away, so have at it.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: Emily Maguire has won the September 2006 edition of Nerve‘s Henry Miller Award “for the best literary sex scene published in the English language.” An excerpt from her novel Taming the Best scored a scintillating 7.19 (which, relative to the competition, is downright pornographic). Definitely click on through. You’ll feel inappropriate in about five minutes.

Now that I have joined the ranks of published authors, I imagine my life will change in a variety of ways – hopefully for the better. For one thing, I’m definitely really ready to start hanging out with a better class of friends. Yesterday, Peter asked me to pull his finger, and in a gross miscalculation he pooped his pants. Anyway, here are a few more ways I imagine my life will change now that I am a published author:

• More women. Or at least higher quality women. No more circus chicks or girls who live out of their vans.
• Will begin most sentences with, “Well, in my book I wrote that…”
• Will keep copies of my book casually splayed out on my coffee table. “Oh! How did that get there?”
• Will be able to afford gin that comes in an actual glass bottle (no more Right Aid brand, plastic jug gin).
• Will probably feel oddly compelled to purchase a cardigan sweater and a pipe.
• Will write favorable reviews of my book on Amazon.com at least once a week.
• Will send copies of my book to all my ex-girlfriends. So they know they’re missing out on dating a published author.
• May start to disregard my own feces.
• Will start calling wine “vino.” As in, “shall we order some vino?”
• Air will smell sweeter, food will taste better, and Random House will send me an apology letter for referring to my last spec novel as “an exercise in suckiness.”
• Will start hanging out with Nick Hornby.
• Will appear on Oprah only to later be discovered as a fraud who never really traded hand-jobs for smack in a Port Authority men’s room.
• Depending upon sales, may trick-out my Prius to look like Kit from “Knight Rider.”
• May teach a creative writing class at the local community college, mainly to scam on coeds. “Your prose has such a quality to it. It’s very mature, very textured. Are you not wearing a bra?”
• Will start going to art openings and saying stuff like, “I find his work very culturally relevant, but aesthetically I just can’t get past the fact that it’s feces smeared across a canvas.”
• And finally, will purchase a blouse or something for Lois. I’m thinking maybe something in mint.

Thanks for reading. And if you haven’t already, go buy my book! Papa needs a new pair of… booze.

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

This is Frazier’s follow-up to Cold Mountain, and it deals with the same time-period and setting: the late 19th century American frontier, when the law was capricious and bath’s were infrequent. Thirteen Moons follows the life and young adulthood of Will Cooper, who at twelve years old was sent off to the edge of the Cherokee Nation with nothing but horse and a fanny pack full of ChapStick to run a trading post. Will grows into a man, falls in love, and befriends a Cherokee Chief named Bear (on a side note, why don’t you ever hear of an Indian Chief named Dog? All we have is a trashy bounty hunter and two past-their-prime rappers… I’m speaking of course of Nate and Snoop). Ultimately, Will ends up fighting alongside the Cherokee to preserve their homeland and culture; kind of like Kevin Costner and the Sioux in Dances With Wolves and later Tin Cup.

The book though, is very well written. Frazier knows his way around the English language and spins a compelling and insightful story. But rather than going on and on about the prose (whoopdeedoo Charles Frazier is a big deal who writes historical fiction and wins fancy awards), I’d like to point out a few things that I would do differently if I were to write a historical novel about 19th century America:

• Everybody would have rickets.
• There would be no orphans, hookers with hearts of gold, or confederate army deserters who’ve degenerated into banjo-playing vagrants.
• Four words: Native American beat boxing.
• My grizzled outdoorsman character who lives by the fat of the land and has forgotten how to exist in an ever-modernizing world would be named Marty.
• He would be played by Adrien Brody in the filmic adaptation.
• And by Jonathan Silverman in the made-for-TV movie.
• The book would point out some of the benefits of the white man indiscriminately killing off all the buffalo. For instance, now if you go driving along Interstate 80, you rarely have to worry about hitting a buffalo that’s crossing the highway.
• There would be a forward which asks the reader to take a drink of beer each time he or she comes across the words “courage,” “infantry,” or “tobacco pouch.”
• Like any good antebellum novel, there will be a feisty plantation owner’s daughter. Only this one will be into S&M and erotic role play.
• The physical description of the male and female love interests would be historically accurate and include missing teeth, small pox scars, and mysterious rashes due to questionable physical hygiene.

So as soon as I’m done promoting Brian Griffin’s Guide to Booze, Broads, and the Lost Art of Being a Man, get ready for Deep Gulch, the adventures of Marty, the ricket-addled grizzled outdoorsman with a buffalo-skin tobacco pouch and a festering sore on his upper buttocks.

With Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, and Festivus coming up, I thought I’d use today’s blog to share my holiday literature wish list (hint-hint):

1) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (JK Rowlings) – That Hermione is developing into a serious piece of tail. And did anyone see that Saturday Night Live skit where Lindsay Lohan played her? It was before she went completely nuts and lost all that weight, so her breasts looked amazing.

2) I’m Proud of You (Tim Madigan) – This is Madigan’s story about his relationship with Fred Rogers (AKA Mr. Rogers) and how it changed his life. I’m planning to write a similar book, but about my relationship with Peter. The working title is I’m Gonna Go Light a Match.

3) The March (E.L. Doctorow) – A novel set against the backdrop of William Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia and the Carolinas at the end of the Civil War, when he set fire to half of the South. Apparently they overcooked his grits at the Waffle House, and he just went berserk.

4) Faith and Politics (John Danforth) – Because these things go together like nudity and Roger Ebert.

5) Greatest Story Ever Sold (Frank Rich) – Details how the Bush administration’s propaganda machine spun 9/11 to consolidate their own power, launch a war against Iraq, intimidate the Democrats into incoherence and incompetence, and ultimately turn a Presidential election into a macho pissing contest where being “the smart one” was a bad thing. So much for Condi in ’08.

6) Teacher Man (Frank McCourt) – McCourt’s memoir about being a public school teacher in New York City. Reminds me of my short stint as a substitute teacher at Buddy Cianci Jr. High. The kids in my remedial English class had the language skills of Sloth from “The Goonies.” (And one of them had that involuntary ear wiggling thing too.)

7) English Roses: Too Good to be True (Madonna) – Another celebrity children’s book. It’s amazing to me how Madonna is continually able to reinvent herself… from punk skeeze, to glamorous skeeze, to twisted Catholic schoolgirl skeeze, to conical boobs S&M skeeze, to faux British skeeze, and finally to maternal skeeze.

8) Foxworthy’s Redneck Dictionary (Jeff Foxworthy) – You know you’re a redneck… if you own a book written by Jeff Foxworthy. (And on a side note, given that most rednecks are functionally illiterate, isn’t this like writing a cookbook for anorexics?)

9) The Darwin Awards IV – My favorite every year is the genius who dies trying to execute some insanely complex and perverted method of masturbation and gets found dead with a random household item sticking out of his pooper.

10) The Varieties of Scientific Experience (Carl Sagan) – This posthumously published book is a collection of his famous “Gifford Lectures on Natural History.” And further proof that a dead Carl Sagan could kick a live Malcolm Gladwell’s ass in mental arm-wrestling any day of the week.

Okay, so HarperCollins asked me to review one or two books for some of this week’s blog entries, and I was expecting The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but instead they sent me Toxic Bachelors by Danielle Steel. It’s like if you’ve ever picked up a glass of whiskey to take a drink, but instead of whiskey it’s orange juice. Now there’s nothing wrong with orange juice intrinsically, but if you’re expecting whiskey it can be a shock to your system.

Anyway, Toxic Bachelors seems to be written for women who want to masturbate but are too embarrassed to buy genuine, hard-core porn. It’s about three attractive bachelors who are determined to stay single and the women who set out to tame them. The first bachelor is Charlie Harrington, a handsome philanthropist (think Edward Stratton from “Silver Spoons” meets Pierce Brosnan) who demands utter perfection from his women (he once broke up with a girl because she ate her peas one at a time; no wait… that was Jerry Seinfeld). The second bachelor is Adam Weiss, a Harvard-trained lawyer (read: Jewish) who likes his women young, hot, and stupid (unlike most of the other men on this planet, who prefer old, ugly, and smart; that’s why you always see us crawling all over each other trying to get into Madeline Albright’s grandma panties). The third and final bachelor is Gray Hawk (no relation to Hudson Hawk or Black Hawk Down), a complicated artist who repeatedly falls for troubled women and is deadly afraid of becoming a family man (he’s been known to pull out before coitus even begins).

As these three walking, talking female masturbatory fantasies prepare to take their annual cruise around the Mediterranean, each meets a woman who will rock his world and perhaps end his carousing days forever. Well, not “perhaps.” I mean, from page one you pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen in this book. Much like in a shady Korean massage parlor, the happy ending is inevitable. Keep in mind, though, that this isn’t necessarily the author’s fault. I mean, can you imagine what might happen if Steel had the womanizing lawyer strike up a relationship with a brilliant young woman and then ultimately dump her for a nymphomaniac stripper with a D-cup? Her readership would go on a menopause-fueled rampage and terrorize the countryside… or at least their local TCBY. That said, knowing exactly what’s going to happen at the end does make for a slightly less engaging read.

The other thing that distracted me was the author continuously rehashing her characters’ Freudian back-stories – as if there had to be something messed-up in a guy’s childhood to make him want a hot, young chick with nice breasts. “Boy that guy’s attracted to Scarlett Johansson, he must have had a terrible upbringing…”

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that while I didn’t love the book, Lois borrowed it from me and I haven’t seen it since. I keep asking her to return it so I can send it back to my editor, but she’s clinging to it like Smeagol and the One Ring.

So, in conclusion, I guess if you have ovaries this may be the book for you.