The Olive Reader

After completing the longest post I’ve written in perhaps a year, I lost it all. Where did it go, huh? WHERE?!!

Gah! It’s my own fault. So much anger. Anyway…

Here are the links I so sinuously wove together:

OliveTV (links now available low on the left side-bar)
Harper
Harper Entertainment
William Morrow
Simon Winchester
Joyce Carol Oates

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!

The Telegraph gives a good list.

The show must go on, as they say … here’s a recent interview with Sebastian with the CBC …

Life is just basically smoke through a keyhole, its just chasing after wind…

For now. The Edith Wharton house (“The Mount”), which faces foreclosure, has been granted a reprieve until May 24th. The house will be open to visitors for another month. So far they have raised $800,000 of the needed $3 million. NY Times. If you follow the link to The Mount above, you’ll see where all that money went and why it was worthwhile.

Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri has told Germany’s Der Spiegel that he has finally decided to ignore his father’s instructions to burn his final manuscript, The Original of Laura, and will instead have it published. Dmitri said, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”

Dmitri has called the manuscript “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”

As reported by the Guardian blog: “Nabokov’s last work will not be burned.”

One of our very favorite paperback authors, Kenneth C. Davis, author of the fantastic Don’t Know Much About® series, has written America’s Hidden History, which goes on sale in a week. In the video below, Ken explains the objective of his new non-fiction project:

…to link/blog about all of the below.

Harper Perennial’s publisher defends her author in Publishers Weekly: “Tropic of Turpitude.”

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

My girlfriend’s parent’s plane was struck by lightning this past week. They’re OK, but thank you for that pang of concern. Here’s the news story. Watch the video. See the people.

San Francisco International Film Festival runs from April 24 to May 8.

At BookSlut there is an interview with Scott Heim, author of We Disappear.

Chip Kidd, author of The Learners and The Cheese Monkeys, has an amazing website: “Good Is Dead.”

Sarah Hall has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for her novel Daughters of the North (published in the UK as The Carhullan Army).

And I’m spent. Now back to the Inbox.

In recognition of the release of Christopher LaMarca’s Forest Defenders: The Confrontational American Landscape and Earth Day 2008, SHIFTING LANDSCAPES features several prominent photographers’ perspectives on our environment and its natural and often unnatural states.

Hey, I haven’t spoken with you guys in a little while. Have some cupcakes.

Simon Michael Bessie, who in 1959 left a top editorial position at what was then called Harper & Brothers to help found Atheneum Publishers, perhaps the last major literary house to be started from scratch in the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 92.

His wife, Cornelia, announced the death.

Mr. Bessie was Atheneum’s president from 1963 to 1975, but he was also known for his strengths in acquiring manuscripts. Over his career he edited writers like Daniel J. Boorstin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kenneth Tynan and Elie Wiesel.

His reputation as an enterprising editor was burnished by a story John Cheever often told, about the publication of Cheever’s first novel, “The Wapshot Chronicle.”

As Susan Cheever recounts it in a memoir of her father, “Home Before Dark” (1984), Mr. Cheever had offered the novel to Random House in 1954, but the publisher turned it down. In despair, he rented a house that summer on Nantucket Island, took his family there and continued working on the novel. One day, as Cheever was staring out the window, a sailing yacht appeared in the harbor and dropped anchor. A man in white flannels and a double-breasted blazer was rowed ashore in a dinghy and announced in the voice of a literate aristocrat to the small crowd that had gathered to greet him, “I’m looking for John Cheever.”

“It was Simon Michael Bessie,” Ms. Cheever writes, “a senior editor at Harper & Row, and he had come to buy ‘The Wapshot Chronicle.’ ”

The New York Times

If you haven’t seen the winner yet, visit the Pulitzer page. We are ecstatic to have two winners: in poetry, Time and Materials by Robert Hass; and in general nonfiction, The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander.

Over at his MySpace page, author Josh Kilmer-Purcell is running a soap-opera, video contest. You want to be a star, don’t you?