Book biz round-up: travelling literary journals, McSweeney’s cooks, and more

• Travelling literary journals are hiding in Toronto coffee joints
• U.K. singer Kate Bush receives permission to use quotes from Joyce’s Ulysses, and it only took 20 years
• Well before Williamsburg, Famous authors and their typewriters
• Sage advice on getting over six-figure book-deal jealousy: go back to your roots
• Eggers’ salad? McSweeney’s launches its first cookbook, Mission Street Food

Obama, Rumsfeld books set for winter release

Simon & Schuster unveiled the cover for O: A Presidential Novel, an anonymously authored novel about U.S. president Barack Obama. The cover features a gold “O” bookended by a pair of protruding ears against a blue background.

Set during the 2012 presidential election, the book is described by The Washington Post as:

a novel about aspiration and delusion [...] written by an anonymous author who has spent years observing politics and the fraught relationship between public image and self-regard. The novel includes revealing and insightful portraits of many prominent figures in the political world – some invented and some real.

There’s been a flurry of speculation about the identity of the author, someone Simon & Schuster says “has been in the room with Barack Obama and wishes to remain anonymous.”

A blogger at the Wall Street Journal points out the futility of such conjecture:

In addition to the 469 employees of the White House, the president had 616 visitors there in December 2010 alone, according to records released by the administration.

And since we don’t know that this “room” is the Oval Office, we should probably also include everyone who’s attended a party or town hall or fund-raiser or campaign trail event also attended by Mr. Obama, plus his classmates, students and colleagues over the years.

O isn’t the only work of fiction inspired by American political figures published this winter. Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott is a novel that publisher McSweeney’s says imagines what would happen if former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “was abducted at night from his Maryland home, held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial, and kept in a place where no one could find him, beyond the reach of the law.”

The novel is set for release Feb. 8, the same day Rumsfeld’s official autobiography, Known and Unknown, is launched by Sentinel. By no coincidence, the covers of both books are similar — though only one features Rumsfeld in an orange jumpsuit.

Daily book biz round-up, April 16

Your end-of-the-week news fix:

• Brits stiffen upper lips and stand up to volcano for the glory and honour of England
• U.S. publishing folks rush to take credit for Pulitzer-winning Tinkers
• Amazon caves (somewhat) on royalty split for Kindle titles
• Zondervan lays off 30 staffers
  
• Fashion designer Marc Jacobs to open le bookstore
• McSweeney’s teams with Salon
• Poetry finally pays off for 90-year-old woman
• New Yorker critic James Wood goes feral

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: Four magazines die, a classic threatened (again), and the two-timing ways of Archie Andrews

Bookish links from around the Web:

• The foodie bride’s lament: Condé Nast-owned magazines Gourmet, Cookie, Elegant Bride, and Modern Bride all cease publication
• More book banning madness: Toronto parent wants Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird off the Toronto District School Board’s curriculum
• Speaking of writers from the American South, Reuters assures us that Maya Angelou is not dead
• Big Love, Riverdale style: Archie Andrews is set to propose to Betty after wedding her snooty rival, Veronica
• Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero could be adapted for the stage
• Your daily laugh, courtesy of McSweeney’s: introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader

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.

Bookmarks: 1,000 novels everyone must read, toilet poems, and more

• The Guardian has created a list of 1000 novels everyone must read, broken down into categories like comedy, crime, family and self, and state of the nation. In considering the list, Stuart Walton wonders whether or not he will lose the will to read.
• A Japanese group is campaigning to use “toilet poems” in bathroom cubicles to decrease toilet paper usage in Japan.
• To: President Obama. From: McSweeney’s, and the kids of the U.S. — Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

Bookmarks: critic saves Nabokov novel, senator saves writer’s home, but nothing could save Duddy Kravitz musical

Some book-related links:

• Did a Slate critic help save Nabokov’s last novel from the flames? (Slate)
• Ontario senator helps save Joy Kogawa’s childhood home (CBC.ca)
• Duddy Kravitz: The Musical was doomed from the start – shocker! (Toronto Star)
• An interview with Larry McMurtry, indie bookseller (Downtown L.A. Scene)
• Alberto Manguel, the romantic librarian (The Guardian)
• Interview with McSweeney’s publisher (Los Angeles Times)
• Heirs of Superman co-creator get copyright share from DC Comics (Toronto Star – scroll down)
• Bonus tabloid link: Michigan comic book store owner shot during robbery (MLive.com)
• Bonus bonus tabloid link: Ginger Spice visits bookstore! With baby! Buys Roald Dahl book! (Celebrity-babies.com)

Quote of the week: “The problem with large bookstores is that they contain usually a lot of junk. My focus as a bookseller is to keep the junk out. Because good books don’t pull bad books up, bad books pull good books down.” – Larry McMurtry

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.”

Major U.S. book awards announced

The nominations for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle award were announced last weekend, and, as always, a few big names were snubbed in the fiction category, most notably Thomas Pynchon. The fiction list was also noteworthy in that none of the 2006 National Book Award nominees – including the eventual winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker – were included.

Two of the nominations went to relative newcomers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), and Kiran Desai for her Man Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic, and Penguin here in Canada). The other nominations went to three authors already ensconced at the top of the American literary scene: Dave Eggers, for his tale of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war, What Is the What (McSweeney’s), Richard Ford, for the third installment in his Frank Bascombe series, The Lay of the Land (Knopf), and Cormac McCarthy, for his post-apocalyptic tale The Road (Knopf).

Just a day after the Book Critics Circle announced their nominations (the full list of which can be seen here), the American Library Association announced the winners of their annual Newbery and Caldecott awards for children’s literature.

The Newbery Medal, for a work of prose fiction, went to a surprise winner: the relatively untouted The Higher Power of Lucky (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Patron, about a motherless girl in a small California town. Meanwhile the Caldecott Medal, for picture books, went to illustrator David Wiesner for his wordless tale Flotsam (Clarion), about a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach. The award makes Wiesner a three-time Caldecott winner: he won for Tuesday in 1991, and for The Three Pigs in 2001.