The Olive Reader

Check out A Bookstore in Brooklyn. It’s the blog of two women (one from Random House, one from the great Soho bookstore McNally Jackson) who are working together to open an independent bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. If you sign up for the email list, you’ll get to find out what they’re going to name the place!

Schuler Books & Music in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, might soon become even more fun. The store might get a liquor license in the next few months, meaning that customers will be able to enjoy books, coffee, food, music, and booze—all in one place. We here at Harper Perennial greatly support the joining of books and booze, and salute Schuler Books & Music. Come for the drinking, stay for the thinking! Or something like that.

If my boyfriend and I had followed through on our original plan to be Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat this year, we could have posted our photos to this Flickr group of literary Halloween costumes. (If you try to tell me that Curious George doesn’t count as literature, I’m going to have to fight you). The best costumes will be posted on The New Yorker‘s book blog. So far there’s multiple Edgar Allen Poes, a Hester Prynne, a Hunter S. Thompson, and more. I guess technically I could post this photo of my costume last year (please avert your eyes if you’re easily offended—I’m the one that’s not the dragon, not the garden gnome, and not the werewolf bar mitzvah):

In celebration of its fourth anniversary, Baltimore-based Squidfire is having a sale. All adult T-shirts, hoodies, and messenger bags are $5 off. So if you’ve ever wanted a t-shirt featuring a squid or a hoodie with the abominable snowman, now’s the time. Here are the two guys behind Squidfire, Jean-Baptiste Regnard and Kevin Sherry, modeling their creations to give you an idea of the kind of stuff they have, as well as their general awesome sensibility:

GigPosters has some of the most amazing poster art I’ve ever seen. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?

What people are saying about The Will to Whatevs by Eugene Mirman, out this February:

“Let’s face it. You can only get so far in life by dressing just like Eugene Mirman, imitating his voice, and wearing a very realistic rubber mask modeled on his face. If you really want to be happy, you have to inhabit HIS VERY MIND. And now, at last, this book allows it! At last, now, you can be truly happy, the MIRMAN WAY. Just be sure to adjust your rubber mask eye holes to ‘READ MODE,’ or else this book will not help you.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require and husband of my high school English teacher

“I laughed out loud reading this. I was reading it in public. Three cute girls at a nearby table laughed at me. I swear one of them mouthed the words, ‘fat loser’ to her friends. I now hate Eugene Mirman.”
— Patton Oswalt

According to this article in the New York Times, the Weekly World News has been sold and may be coming back. If you don’t remember it from the supermarket checkout line, the Weekly World News is that wacky tabloid that features the most bizarre news out there, from aliens mating with celebrities to bat boys in high-speed car chases. The Times describes it thusly:

The Weekly World News was started in 1979 by Generoso P. Pope Jr., then the publisher of The National Enquirer. It distinguished itself from its sister tabloid with its deadpan articles on the bizarre. While The Enquirer might print rumors of a politician’s affair, Weekly World News would print rumors of a politician’s affair with an alien.

It specialized in subjects scientific, religious and political. Some of the more memorable covers have included “Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave,” “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby,” “Dick Cheney Is a Robot,” and several stories about a love affair between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, including their adoption of a shaved ape child.

If you can’t wait for the print edition to come back, you can tide yourself over with the new online edition.

Great article about pairing books and booze, something we at Harper Perennial do fairly often (but not too often). They don’t have any recommendations for my drinks of choice—amaretto sour or stoli vanilla and coke—but otherwise it’s fairly comprehensive.

It’s a little NSFW (and yet here I am, looking at it at work), but check out Naomi Harris’s new photos on Women in Photography. Harris traveled the country and attended 40 swingers parties, taking portraits of people who, during normal hours, sit at desks and drive kids to soccer practice and the like.

Welcome to my very first (but hopefully not my last) olive interview. William Conescu, author of Being Written, graciously offered to answer some of my questions. Being Written is the story of a man who knows he’s a minor character in a book and the lengths to which he’ll go to win a bigger part. It’s about both the artistic and the general life ennui of a bunch of characters in their late 20s, but it’s also a thriller. (I know, a thriller about ennui sounds strange. And it is—in a wonderful way.)

After you read the interview (and the book), check out the reading group guide—William is available to call in to book club meetings and answer your own questions, too. (You can contact him by clicking on his linked name above.)

And by the way, I particularly sympathize with William’s answer to question 5.

1. Daniel desperately wants to be a major character in the novel that he thinks is being written. What made you decide to center your novel on someone who has to work so hard to make an impact, someone who is so much of an outsider?

I was interested in writing about artistically-minded people in their twenties and thirties struggling to figure out how best to live their lives, and then I had this playful idea about a minor character who can hear the author’s pencil scratching when other characters are “being written” nearby. There are parallels in these struggles. Daniel is also figuring out what to do with his unique ability and what role he might play in his universe. So I combined the two ideas: Daniel hears a story being written about these artsy twenty/thirty-something-year-olds, and he works his way into their lives and their story and ultimately hijacks their book.

2. Daniel believes that nothing matters unless it’s “being written.” With constant blogging, constant Facebook and twitter updates, and reality tv, do you think our society is headed toward sharing that belief? Can that impulse to have yourself documented for posterity be controlled?

I hope the impulse to have yourself documented can be controlled! When you believe that being documented—“being written,” like the characters in my novel, or being on reality television—is the one thing that will give your life meaning, then you might make decisions differently from, say, the average rabbi or elementary school teacher.

3. Is Daniel crazy?

Or is he the only character in the novel who understands how his universe works?

4. Daniel uses a writing manual to try to gain some insight into the author’s plans for him, and to try to manipulate the course of events—and of course, things don’t go nearly as well as the manual might have led him to expect. Even though you satirize them, do you think those kinds of books can help writers?

I think books about writing can be helpful or validating, as long as they’re not too prescriptive. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is a wonderful book, and I’ve taught workshops using Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. But Daniel has found a by-the-numbers book on how to write a bestseller, and he’s treating it like a self-help manual for the aspiring protagonist.

5. Graham and Delia are experiencing a post-college slump, where they’ve rejected typical career paths and yet still aren’t successful at pursuing their art. Did you ever experience anything similar? If so, how did you snap out of it?

I did experience something similar, and that was part of the inspiration for this novel. I wrote a lot in high school, college, and my very early twenties, but then I kept putting it aside. I’d switch jobs or move to a new city, and I’d tell myself I needed to settle into things and then I’d write again. But that kept happening, and I realized one day that the story of my life was in-progress. I wasn’t “waiting to get started.” So if writing fiction was important to me, then I needed to make it a regular part of my life. So I did! I wrote Being Written, and I’ve been writing regularly ever since.

6. This was your first book. What about the process of getting published was different from what you expected?

The whole process has been very exciting. I think I was most surprised by how many times I’ve thought, “This is it, the moment I’ve been waiting for.” The day I started working with an agent, or sold the novel, or saw the advance copy, or had my first hometown book reading or New York book reading. The excitement is dispersed.

7. What is the book/publishing/writing scene like in Chapel Hill?

There are a lot of writers living in or near Chapel Hill, in part because of the universities and in part because this is a beautiful part of the country. I moved here from New Orleans and was excited to discover that there are three seasons other than summer.

8. What are you working on now?

I recently completed a first draft of my next novel. It’s not a work of metafiction, but it has its own flavor of strangeness to it.

9. What kinds of cats do you have? (I noticed in the PS that you mentioned your cats being around while you work.)

I have two terrific cats: a calico and an orange tabby. They’re littermates, and they’re big-boned and tall—and tall sideways too.

Just read a really thought-provoking article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell comparing prodigies and late bloomers. Much of the article focuses on Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which came out last year from Ecco/Harper Perennial. Though I am a big fan of the book, I never knew that Ben was a late bloomer who quit a job as a lawyer to toil for nearly twenty years before releasing his first book.

Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire was just nominated for the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. It’s out now in hardcover from our friends at Harper; our Harper Perennial trade paperback edition will be out in March.

Winners will be announced November 19 and will receive $10,000 and a bronze statue.

That would be our newly released Olive Editions of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Everything is Illuminated. Those of you in New York City should check out our full-page ad promoting both the Olive Editions and our own assets in this week’s issue of The L Magazine. Those of you not in New York City, or those of you who want to know what goes on inside the Harper Perennial secret headquarters, should check out this behind-the-scenes video:

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot me, MS, CS, cover designer MB, marketing master SS, and editorial mavens BH and JP. Ahh, if only every event in our sixth-floor conference room was this fun . . .

As a blog dedicated to books, this bookmark (available here) has us feeling a bit conflicted. We agree: Read more books. But read more blogs, too, as long as they’re about books.

Check out Sarah Schmelling’s Hamlet: Facebook News Feed Edition. My favorite parts are “Hamlet became a fan of daggers” and “Ophelia removed moody princes from her interests.” Schmelling’s got a book coming out where she does this for other classic works, and you can check out some of her other articles here. I recommend “Ryan Seacrest Breaks Bad News.”

And while we’re talking about Facebook, you should go be our friend.