The Olive Reader

The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin goes on sale today. With “echoes of Of Mice and Men“(The Bookseller, UK), it explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers—on the run after a hit-and-run accident—who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.

Sounds good, yes? For more information visit Willy’s site.

“How do we define the places we live and how they define us?”

PEN’s online forum asks you to read essays by World Voices participants and, responding to the question above, to post your comments. The essays are outstanding and address the same question from multiple perspectives. It’s a nice warm-up to the festivities beginning on the 24th.

It’s time to welcome a new blog to the HarperCollins family: Book Club Girl!!!!. Jen Hart, VP/Associate Publisher of Harper Perennial and Ecco, has caught the blogging bug. She’ll focus on books, activities, and events all aimed at a book-clubbing audience. So do us a favor and welcome her to the neighborhood. Best of luck, Jen.

Book Club Girl

The NY Times reports:

Egon Bondy, a poet and philosopher whose idiosyncratic cocktail of whimsically demented verse and profoundly subversive metaphysics lubricated the underground movement that helped topple Communism in Czechoslovakia, died on Monday in Bratislava, Slovakia. He was 77.

The UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, announced yesterday the 2007 shortlist. Muriel Gray, Chair of judges, said she was exhilarated to help “further expose women authors at this level of excellence to as wide a reading public as possible.” Without further ado, here’s the shortlist (with odds):

• 11/4 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun
• 3/1 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
• 7/2 Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
• 5/1 Jane Harris The Observations
• 11/2 Xiaolu Guo A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
• 11/2 Anne Tyler Digging to America

Are up! Catch ‘em while they’re hot. Some of the winners:

• Fiction – The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)
• General Nonfiction – The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
• History – The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Knopf)
• Biography – The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
• Poetry – Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)

CK is kicking it in Berlin before heading to the London Book Fair. She’s been doing some great research:

elt in Angst – State of Fear

Der Sturm – Perfect Storm

Dreizehn Monde – 13 Moons

Ich Bin Charlotte Simmons – I Am Charlotte Simmons

Unentschlossen – Indecision

This is probably one of the best links that has been sent to me in awhile. The Guardian has done up a special report on ““Writer’s rooms”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/writersrooms.” If I had to choose one, I’d go with JG Ballard (though, David Hare’s would do just fine, too).

Also, there’s an interview up with Dennis Loy Johnson at the Cruelest Month.

The AP reports:

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died Wednesday. He was 84.

For the past three years, my go-to karaoke HIT was Bon Jovi’s “Always.” You might be wondering if the soaring notes of that manly ballad are too much for me, but I assure you, with a NYSMMA area all-state certificate in hand, I do okay. Yet it looks like always is NOT forever. ““It is with great regret that Flying Dolphin Press announces that Bon Jovi will not be performing at BEA in June…”:http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/book_fairs/bea_forced_to_cancel_bon_jovi_concert_56638.asp”

Original Fiction for the Underground. LITRO is “a literary alternative to Metro (the free newspaper) and is distributed each Friday near to London Underground stations and elsewhere around the world.” I’ve yet to see a hardcopy, but most of what you need can be found here.

Senior Designer Greg Kulick gets a lavish tongue-bathing for his cover treatment of Final Exits by Michael Largo (which just happened to win the 2006 Bram Stoker Award in non-fiction). If you’ve never been here before, and if you love book covers, the time is now.

Listen to an interview with Rishi Reddi, author of Karma and Other Stories, at the Harper Perennial Podcast episode #11.

This time, we talk with Rishi Reddi, author of Karma and Other Stories. The book is a collection of inter-related short stories that creates a densely-layered picture of the lives of Indian families living in the United States. Rishi herself was born in India, and grew up in the U.S. She has said that she wrote these stories to help her understand how feeling like an outsider in both cultures has influenced her life.

Philip Roth has won the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The award carries a $40,000 prize.

“To my mind, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner form the backbone of 20th-century American literature,” Roth said in a statement given to The Associated Press.

***

Also, and just for fun, Maud has linked to the Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders reading from last year’s New Yorker Festival. I was actually at the event, and recalled in a previous post that the moderator “was so dry he was a fire hazard.” That’s not to say he didn’t do a good job; he was just very dry. Maybe you go and see?

New York magazine ponders the equation: Can You Tell a Lot About Debut Novelists From Their Times Book Review Covers? I think the better question would be “What can you tell…” because if you can’t “tell a lot” can you “tell a little”? Piddling aside, the trend does deserve some attention. Just in the past two months, three debut novelists have appeared on the cover, exceeding the yearly average. What the mo’?