BEA Roundup
Written byPosted on June 5, 2007
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- I am currently surrounded by many boxes, which arrived today. I cannot recommend FedEx Home Delivery enough, should you decide to move cross country. My trusty desktop computer, the box I’ve deemed the Command Center, is almost hooked up. (Apologies for grammatical gaffes to those who have been kind enough to point them out. The laptop, which I’ve been using for pretty much everything in the past week, is very much the secondary computer.) And I’ll be very close to boogeying here once the desk arrives this week. In the meantime, here is a roundup of BEA reports.
- The Literary Dish serves up The Unofficial BEA Story, covering the African-American publishing end of the conference. (I don’t know if this content was aggregated from somewhere else, but I’m glad it’s posted somewhere.)
- Patrick Carbidge has Part I and Part II.
- Vegan Cupcakes.
- Megan Sullivan is convinced that it’s all about long days and long nights. Plus, she managed to meet Philip Roth.
- Critical Mass has posted a report on the crisis panel.
- Buzz Girl has pictures. As does Mary Reagan.
- Detailed diaries from Dan Wickett.
- Jim Winter confesses he’s a trade show virgin.
- World Unleashed’s list of hot galleys.
- A BEA Omnibus from Mark, with links elsewhere.
- Russell Simmons even showed up.
- David R. Godine avoided conversations about baseball.
- There are apparently budget hotels that are iPod themed. Whether podcasts were siphoned into each room through hidden speakers is anyone’s guess.
- The Post BEA (Sausage) Links Edition.
- Lou Anders: “BEA is lived on your feet, fueled by Starbucks, and endured by great conversations….”
- I did notice more comics booths this year. The Beat has a roundup on that end.
- More links from Oxford University Press.
- I will try and go through upcoming titles at some point this week or next. This year, instead of interviewing publicists at the big publishers, I opted to spend most of my floor time around the smaller publishers. On Sunday, I grabbed every catalog I could. I now have half a suitcase filled with them.
- The number of overly safe titles and lackluster galleys really surprised me this year. Perhaps it’s the shakeup from the Perseus restructuring or declining sales, but, while there were galleys that excited me (and I had no idea that I was as much of an enthusiast of Richard Russo until I saw the galley of his next book), there weren’t many that wowed me the way they had in previous years. Of course, the proof is ultimately in the books. I will say, however, that, of the larger houses, Bloomsbury and Grove/Atlantic seem to have the best pickings. And it was great to see Small Beer maintaining a booth this year.
- More later.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
We also sold a lot of books, besides riding the subway and not talking about baseball! Did I not mention that?