Once again I am acting as agent for an author. I recently received the following message from Jennifer Ackerman who came to Porter Square Books a couple of years ago to read from her book Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body. She is working on a new book and is looking for recommendations of good books "to curl up with". With her permission, I am enlarging the pool of respondents to our loyal customers and bloggers. All is explained below and I hope you will take the time to dash off a comment here and I'll send them along to Jennifer. Thanks so much for considering. I think we all have a couple in us.
*******************************************************************************
Subject: a writer's query
Hi Folks at Porter Square Books,
As you may know, I'm a writer (and a fan of your bookstore, which I visited
on tour for Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream). I'm writing today to ask a favor.
I'm working on a book about the common cold called Achoo! The Uncommon Life of the Common Cold, to be published by Twelve in 2011. The book includes a chapter on The Real Cure: Recipes and Readings, which offers recipes for comfort food from chefs such as Lynne Rossetto Kasper, and also, a list of books recommended by experts such as yourselves, that make for great "curl up in bed when you're down with a cold" reading. I know there's no end to the possibilities here, but if a title or two strikes you as particularly fitting (something under the sun to warm the bones, for example), I would be most grateful for your suggestions, along with a line or two about why your choice makes for good sick-bed reading. I will of course credit you and the store.
Thank you so much for considering this. I look forward to hearing from you.
Warm regards,
Jenny (Ackerman)
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Two great new graphic novels
I'll write more about both of these titles later, but I wanted to draw everyone's attention to two great new graphic novels, one that is out now and the other that is coming out in September.
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli is out now and is garnering a lot of well-deserved praise. It's a beautiful book with many of the pages works of art in their own right. The titular character is a brilliant but self-absorbed architect whose invincible egoism leads him to a crisis point in his personal life. Subtle details connect events in the story and it concludes with such a powerful moment that I had to take a long walk to clear my head of the effect.
Logicomix will be out in late September and tells the story of Bertrand Russell's quest to find a universal language of logic. It doesn't sound like the kind of topic suited to the comic genre but the book's creators do a brilliant job using their medium to communicate complex and challenging philosophical ideas. They also make this a real story, casting Russell, and many of the people around him, as traditional, questing heroes for truth. Despite all the heavy thinking, the authors create moments of humor and triumph that make the work a great story as much as it is a philosophical exploration.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Inherent Vice trailer
Check out this way cool book trailer put together by the publisher for the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. The book went on sale Tuesday and has been flying out of the store since!
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
examiner.com
Tooting our own horn department: Lynette Benton, who writes about writing as a career for examiner.com, has been surveying local bookstores. She recently posted a terrific piece about us. Thanks Lynette.
Friday, July 31, 2009
jonathan tropper
The following post was written by Jonathan Tropper and is being posted for him by myself, a huge fan. This is Jonathan's second visit to Porter Square Books. One of the many perks of my job is being able to invite select authors to the store. I have read all of Tropper's books and they just keep getting better and better. You should really check him out in print OR in person Tuesday, August 11 at 7PM!
This Is Where I Leave You is my fifth novel, and like most of my books, it is not the novel I originally set out to write. I started out telling the story of Judd Foxman, who comes home one day to discover that his wife has been sleeping with his boss for the last year, effectively ending his marriage and his career. I was interested in writing about a man in his mid-thirties suddenly stripped of the two things that most defined him. That was the plan.
At one point, midway through my first draft, I brought Judd back for a visit to his childhood home for the first time since his marriage had ended, where he was forced to face his siblings and mother and confess his new reality to them. It was meant to be a single chapter, just another painful experience on Judd’s downward spiral, but then a funny thing happened; the family came to life for me. And as I wrote about Judd’s angry, dysfunctional siblings and his wildly unconventional mother, I realized that the characters, the dialogue, and the writing itself were clicking for me in a way that it hadn’t in all the preceding pages. So, after a few vain attempts to expand the role of Judd’s family in my existing framework, I decided to toss the framework and write the novel about Judd and his family instead. I came up with the idea of a shiva - the Jewish mourning ritual - seven days in which the entire family is basically trapped together under one roof, and it just took off from there.
Over the course of my career I have found that, despite my best laid plans, it is ultimately this sort of happy accident that determines the direction of my books. The trick is in recognizing when it’s happening, and being willing to scrap the blueprint and start over.
I’m looking forward to returning to Porter Square Books on the evening of August 11 to discuss This Is Where I Leave You.
This Is Where I Leave You is my fifth novel, and like most of my books, it is not the novel I originally set out to write. I started out telling the story of Judd Foxman, who comes home one day to discover that his wife has been sleeping with his boss for the last year, effectively ending his marriage and his career. I was interested in writing about a man in his mid-thirties suddenly stripped of the two things that most defined him. That was the plan.
At one point, midway through my first draft, I brought Judd back for a visit to his childhood home for the first time since his marriage had ended, where he was forced to face his siblings and mother and confess his new reality to them. It was meant to be a single chapter, just another painful experience on Judd’s downward spiral, but then a funny thing happened; the family came to life for me. And as I wrote about Judd’s angry, dysfunctional siblings and his wildly unconventional mother, I realized that the characters, the dialogue, and the writing itself were clicking for me in a way that it hadn’t in all the preceding pages. So, after a few vain attempts to expand the role of Judd’s family in my existing framework, I decided to toss the framework and write the novel about Judd and his family instead. I came up with the idea of a shiva - the Jewish mourning ritual - seven days in which the entire family is basically trapped together under one roof, and it just took off from there.
Over the course of my career I have found that, despite my best laid plans, it is ultimately this sort of happy accident that determines the direction of my books. The trick is in recognizing when it’s happening, and being willing to scrap the blueprint and start over.
I’m looking forward to returning to Porter Square Books on the evening of August 11 to discuss This Is Where I Leave You.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Literary Smackdown
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Our Noise
A new website has just been launched with a pretty cool design and info about a forthcoming book about the history of Merge Records, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small. We'll have it when the book publishes on September 15.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
