This morning, HarperCollins announced a new imprint called HarperScrew. The new imprint will be headed by HarperStudio’s Bob Miller and will set out to screw the writer.
“We’ve been going about this business the wrong way,” said Miller. “Why should we even pay the writers at all when they can all just be screwed over?”
Writers will pay $50,000 a pop to be screwed over by Harper. The authors don’t even have to produce books. They just need to be screwed. The screwing will take on many forms: sodomy, needless editorial tampering, and more pedestrian forms of humiliation. Harper has not yet announced a business model, and publishing experts are still wondering exactly how Miller and his team will profit from the screwing. But they have begun screwing a select elite group of writers and hope to have the screwing down sometime in the fall.
Objections came this morning from a surprising source: the foul-mouthed Al Goldstein, long associated with Screw Magazine.
“Who do these cocksuckers think they are?” barked Goldstein. “Not only do they take my brand name, but they take some of my fucking ideas.”
As a peace offering, Miller has asked Goldstein if he would like to be screwed under the new imprint. Negotiations are still pending, but it is believed that Goldstein will, in all likelihood, be screwed.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I’m so sorry that word of HarperScrew has leaked out early this way. We’ll be interested in seeing if any authors would like to get screwed. Meanwhile, we’ll keep doing HarperStudio instead, which pays advances of up to $100,000 and shares profits equally with authors…