Children’s authors and illustrators sign proclamation demanding better picture books

A group of U.S. children’s authors and illustrators have found an eye-catching way to demand better quality picture books from their peers.

A manifesto, signed by 21 members of the kids’ publishing industry, appeared as a full-page ad in the November issue of Horn Book Magazine and on the website thepicturebook.co. The coalition is spearheaded by Mac Barnett, a San Francisco author who sits on the board of 826LA, the non-profit writing and tutoring centre founded by Dave Eggers. Vancouver-born artist Carson Ellis handlettered and illustrated the document. Other authors and illustrators who have signed the letter include Laurie Keller, Lemony Snicket, and Jon Scieszka.

The manifesto begins with a proclamation: “We are tired of hearing the picture book is in trouble, and tired of pretending it is not.” The group calls for titles that are “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and asks authors to “cease writing the same book again and again.”

Barnett says he wrote the document on a former professor’s advice. He told Publishers Weekly:

“The target audience for ‘A Picture Book Manifesto’ is quite sweeping.… It is really an exhortation to everyone – writers, illustrators, editors, publishers, art directors, booksellers, librarians, and parents – that we could all be doing better. The only people who are doing fine are the kids themselves. I really believe the rest of us should be doing better.”

Daily book biz round-up: Mankell still missing; Rick Warren goes AWOL; and more

All the news, none of the calories:

• Henning Mankell’s exact whereabouts still unknown
• Jeff Bezos to Princeton grads: be as awesome as I am
• Rick Warren’s highly anticipated follow-up to Purpose Driven Life to be postponed indefinitely
• A look inside the Pope’s dusty private library
• Dave Eggers takes his acclaimed literacy centres to London
• The Montreal Gazette looks at last weekend’s Anarchist Bookfair

McSweeney’s mysterious namesake dies at 67

McSweeney’s Quarterly has announced on its website that Timothy McSweeney, the man for whom Dave Eggers named the literary journal, died on Jan. 24 at age 67. In a letter, the McSweeney family wrote that he faced “a long struggle with illness.”

Dave Eggers came to know Timothy McSweeney as a young boy, through mysterious letters the man sent to Dave and his mother, whose maiden name was McSweeney. According to an essay by Eggers, they began receiving these letters when he was about eight years old, “usually notes written on pamphlets and other sorts of mail that required no postage. The messages were confusing, but generally seemed to be written by a man named Timothy McSweeney, who thought he was related to my mother, and who was hoping to visit soon.” The young Eggers was intrigued, and kept the letters tucked away in a drawer in his room. Although the man never appeared, Eggers always wondered who the real Timothy McSweeney was.

So in 1998, when Eggers (the future author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) was creating a new literary journal, the name Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern came to him. “It made sense on many levels,” Eggers says on the website. “I was able to honor my Irish side of the family and also allude to this mysterious man and the sense of possibility and even wonder he’d brought to our suburban home.”

In 2000, Eggers discovered the true identity of the mysterious Timothy McSweeney. McSweeney once taught art at Rutgers University, but became consumed by alcoholism and mental illness, and was eventually placed under care in an institution for mental health. It was from there that McSweeney sent the letters to Eggers and his mother. From Eggers’ post:

Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeney’s insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy’s background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word. Since 2000 we’ve implicitly dedicated all issues to the real Timothy.

The first issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern had the mandate of publishing only works that had been rejected by other magazines. Since then, however, it has published writing by authors such as Michael Chabon and Joyce Carol Oates. And according to the McSweeney family, “by encouraging and celebrating self-expression, McSweeney’s, its contributors, and its readers already offer the most fitting tribute possible to Timothy’s life.”

Bookmarks: Birthday wishes for Margaret Atwood, and more

Bookish links from around the Web:

• Happy (belated) birthday, Margaret Atwood. The author turned 70 yesterday
• Colum McCann has won the fiction prize at the National Book Awards for his novel Let the Great World Spin. Also at last night’s gala in New York, Dave Eggers picked up the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community
• Expanding on James Wood’s assertion that “prizes are the new reviews,” Salon.com’s Laura Miller discusses the emerging trend of “vanity book awards”
• Is the Apple tablet dead?
• The Literary Review has released the shortlist for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. On this year’s list are Philip Roth – no surprise there – Nick Cave, Paul Theroux, and Jonathan Littell
• Lou Reed, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and Doug Yule, three members of the Velvet Underground, are reuniting for the first time in more than a decade, at – where else? – a branch of the New York Public Library, to promote a new coffee-table book, The Velvet Underground: New York Art

Bookmarks: why McCarthy won’t autograph, the definitive titles of the Noughties, and more

• James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, fought to keep a gay subplot in the novel.

• Cormac McCarthy talks about the film version of The Road in the Wall Street Journal and why you won’t find a signed copy of the book

• Remember when Scholastic tried to censor a tween book because one character had two moms? Mobylives reports that parent fanatics are at it again, this time trying to ban the entire Scholastic catalogue

• Dalton Higgins is this month’s writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto.

• The Telegraph posted their definitive Books of the Noughties. Nothing very surprising – White Teeth, Atonement, Brick Lane -  Dave Eggers’s memoir comes in fourth, right behind good ol’ Dan Brown, Obama’s memoir, and bien sur, Harry Potter at number one. Sigh.

Laferrière wins Medicis

Montreal author (and recent Q&Q cover star) Dany Laferrière is on a roll lately. After winning the $10,000 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix last week, he has now been named recipient of France’s illustrious Prix Medicis literary award, alongside U.S. author Dave Eggers.

According to AFP:

Laferrière won the Medicis for L’enigme du retour (The Enigma of Return), a fictionalised account of the 56-year-old author’s soul-wrenching return to his native Haiti to attend his father’s funeral. Born in Port-au-Prince but now living in Montreal and Miami, Laferrière has explored the themes of identity and exile in some 20 novels over the past 25 years.

Laferrière won the French-language prize, while Eggers won the prize for best foreign novel for his 2006 work What Is the What? Lafèrriere is only the second Canadian novelist to win the Medicis. The first was Marie-Claire Blais, who won in 1966 for Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.

Bookmarks: Terminatrix Palin, Wild Things art, and the interactive Proust questionnaire

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s HarperCollins editor has a double life, The Daily Beast reports. He also helped work on the satirical title published during Palin’s VP run, Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles
• Just before the Oct. 16 opening of the long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are, Vice Magazine has compiled a gallery of WtWTA-inspired artwork by 24 of its favourite artists; The New York Times wonders if kids actually “get” Maurice Sendak’s much-celebrated tale; and Newsweek interviews Sendak, screenwriter Dave Eggers, and director Spike Jonze on fear, childhood, and Mickey Mouse, among other things
• In order to promote its forthcoming book, Vanity Fair now makes its infamous Proust questionnaire available as an interactive game
• Google vs. Angela Merkel: The Guardian reports that the German chancellor has intervened in the debate and is appealing for more international co-operation on copyright protection
• Today, starting at 12 EST, fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman and a thousand Twitter followers will collaborate on an audiobook script. Sponsored by BBC Audiobooks America, the “round-robin interactive storytelling experience” takes place on this Twitter page

Fearing the death of print? Dave Eggers will cheer you up!

If you’re in the publishing industry, surely you’ve had nightmares about the death of print. Dave Eggers, author and editor of McSweeney’s, wants to calm your troubled mind and has promised to do so by personally e-mailing anyone worried about the future of the printed word.

At a New York Authors Guild event held in his honour earlier this week, Eggers made this pledge to prove worrywarts wrong, reports GalleyCat:

I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org – if you want to take it down – if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper – we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

Any nervous print types out there care to test his vow?

Fun with movie trailers

A couple of literary-themed movie trailers hit the Internet recently.

The preview for the adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh can be seen here. Directed by Dodgeball auteur Rawson Thurber, the film looks to have, ah, streamlined some of the themes of Chabon’s novel. In the trailer, at least, there’s only a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to the narrator’s struggle with his sexual identity, which is the crux of the novel. To be fair, though, trailers don’t always represent movies with scrupulous accuracy.

Also looming is Away We Go, a film scripted by author/McSweeney‘s founder Dave Eggers and his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and directed by Sam Mendes. According to the IMDB, the film is about a couple expecting their first child who, obviously being too special to live just anywhere, travel the country in search of the place that will best nurture their uniquely beautiful souls. To be fair, though, Quillblog is paraphrasing. The trailer is here.

Salon on the money woes of McSweeney’s

As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S.-based McSweeney’s is appealling to its readership to help them out of a financial jam, one brought on by the 2006 collapse of its distributor, AMS. They’re offering a discount of 30% off new titles and 50% off backlist in order to bump up orders, as well as auctioning off works by Art Spiegelman, Miranda July, and several others. Now, Salon has posted a piece about McSweeney’s’ difficulties and about the similar difficulties faced by all small presses post-AMS.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. “For us the timing was particularly bad,” says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney’s Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. “We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] ‘What Is the What,’ which was our best seller of all time.”

But it looks as if things are improving, or at least for McSweeney’s anyway:

Horowitz says McSweeney’s has received “thousands of orders in the last few days,” [and says] “In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we’re about.”