A Few Quick Updates

⇒A few days ago, I mentioned an upcoming workshop led by Naomi Wolf for nonfiction writers in New York City. I’ve since agreed to participate in the second of the three workshops, sharing my perspective on blogging and social media and how they relate to the publishing and media cycles authors experience when their books are acquired and released.

⇒I’m still doing interviews for Getting Right with Tao—over the weekend, I answered five questins at LitKicks, a book website that’s been around about as long as Beatrice has. In it, I make a joke about how this book has almost nothing to do with my last book, and how if I’d paid better attention to Greil Marcus I could tie it all together somehow, but already one of the comments has got me thinking that maybe that’s not such a crazy idea.

⇒It was a little over a year ago that William Dietrich discussed the origins of the Ethan Gage series, and now the fourth and (for now) final adventure, The Barbary Pirates, is out. Apparently, Dietrich’s next project jumps about a century and a half forward in time; Icereich has its narrative roots in a real-life expedition Nazi scientists undertook in the Himalayas looking for the origins of the Aryan race. (Jim Shepard also wrote about this expedition in the short story “Ancestral Legacies,” but we can assume Dietrich’s take on it will be different.)

7 April 2010 | uncategorized |

“I’ve Always Been a Sucker for a Good Story”

It’s been a little over two years since I began my sideline in literary event hosting with a reception for Adam Langer upon the publication of Ellington Boulevard. Yesterday I was sent a URL for the promotional trailer for his next novel, The Thieves of Manhattan, which is coming out this summer, and I couldn’t wait to share it with you. Any of you who followed my career at GalleyCat, or are simply aware of certain scandals within the publishing industry over the last four years, will be rather amused by the central conceit.

Let’s put it this way: The novel has blurbs from Laura Albert and Clifford Irving—I’ve got the galley on my desk, and even though pub date is still three months off, it’s moved about six slots up my to-do list.

6 April 2010 | read this |