My year of writing a trendy book for the masses

If you were planning to write a My Year of Doing Something Singularly Weird or Stupid or Virtuous memoir, you better get those pitches in soon. The LA Times claims the trend is soon to be played out:

They’re not professional pranksters, exactly, but the authors of what might be called gimmick books — memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings: This year, I will take all of my instruction from self-help gurus. Or, this month, I will be radically honest with everyone I meet. Or, today I will try to behave exactly like George Washington, genteel bow, Dudley Do-Right walk and all.

The last few years have also seen many green-themed gimmick books, including Colin Beavan’s new No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. Gimmicky or not, some have been fabulously successful, and as it gets harder to break into print, the category remains one that publishers invest in.

The article goes on to explore the king of the gimmick genre, A.J. Jacobs. The title of his next book is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. He spent 2004 on a quest to become the smartest man, and 2007 taking the Bible literally.

Scott Timberg posits that these stunt books may be the result of the industry’s earlier slew of poor-me suckfest memoirs, the more harrowing the childhood the better. Timberg quotes industry observer Sara Nelson:

“Poor Frank McCourt wouldn’t get published today, I’d bet.” says Nelson, “The dreary Irish childhood recounted in Angela’s Ashes, from 1996, “was pretty horrific, but in an old-fashioned way. Readers have been desensitized to that.”

Bookmarks: Frank McCourt, Yann Martel, Tom Wolfe, Harry Potter, and more

Some book-related links:

• Frank McCourt dies at 78.
• Yann Martel’s new novel gets a U.S. deal.
• Tom Wolfe says, “To the moon, America, to the moon…”
• Harry Potter books “very Talmudic.”
• What’s wrong with the Hugo shortlist?
• Leave Hemmingway aloooooone!!!
• Five laws of the novelist.

Author Frank McCourt may have only weeks to live

The Independent in the U.K. is reporting that Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt may be near death. It was publicly announced in May that McCourt, who turns 79 next month, had been battling melanoma and that following a course of chemotherapy the cancer had gone into remission. Reports now claim that McCourt’s condition has deteriorated. From The Independent:

After receiving treatment at the world-famous Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York, the writer was declared well enough to return home to Connecticut.

However, a friend said yesterday that Mr. McCourt’s condition has deteriorated dramatically since then and that he is seriously ill.

It is understood he became unwell while on a cruise in the Pacific and was transferred to a hospital in Tahiti.

McCourt’s first book, the memoir Angela’s Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He followed up on this success with two other bestselling memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man. The author published his first children’s book, Angela and the Baby Jesus, in 2007, and The Independent reports that he has been working on his first novel and is planning a YA book.