2012’s Author/Blogger Season: Coming Soon!

After a brief break for the holidays, I’m back making my weekly posts for the USA Network’s Character Approved blog. This week’s post was about The Last Nude, the second novel from Ellis Avery. There’s a grain of historical truth to the story: Tamara de Lempicka really did find a woman named Rafaela in the Bois de Boulogne and recruit her to be a model for several of her paintings, taking her as a lover while she was at it. But Avery has created an entire life for Rafaela, who she imagines as a 17-year-old from New York, who jumped ship and made her way to Paris to escape an arranged marriage with an Italian cousin. At first, her relationship with Tamara opens her up to a world of possibilities, but when greedy art collectors start circling around the sensuous portraits of the young girl, she discovers the limits of Tamara’s affections…

It’s a great read, which is why I’m doubly excited that Ellis Avery will be participating in the first of this year’s “Author/Blogger” events in the series I curate at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore. On Monday, February 20, at 7 p.m., Avery will read from The Last Nude and then discuss the novel and its themes with Miriam Z. Perez, one of the bloggers at Feministing. Perez, a writer and reproductive justice activist based in Brooklyn, is also the founder of RadicalDoula.com, and has received various awards and recognitions for her work, including recognition as a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging LGBT Voice in Non-Fiction in 2010. So this is sure to be another exciting conversation of the sort that we’ve become accustomed to having at Greenlight, and if you’re in the area I hope you’ll think about joining us.

While I’m on the subject, I’m trying to put together the schedule for the rest of this year’s author/blogger events, so if you’re a book publicist who’s been thinking about sending one of your authors to New York City for a tour appearance between March and, oh, let’s say November, I’d encourage you to put this series on your radar. We generally get a good-sized crowd; we always get a passionate audience. And the folks at Greenlight are a wonderful bookselling crew. You really can’t go wrong sending an author there. So you can get in touch with me, or contact the Greenlight crew—I’m eager to see how the schedule comes together.

Oh, I’m also reaching out to bloggers in the New York City area, too: We’ve had some really great bloggers participate in the series so far, and I know of some other people I would love to bring into the bookstore, but it’s a big city, and I don’t know everyone in it. So if you think you’d enjoy having a 20-minute conversation with an author in front of an audience, get in touch—even better would be if you know of a specific book that’s coming out in 2012 whose author you’d love to ask questions.

11 January 2012 | events |

Notes Towards an Ambassador of Literature

Shortly after writing a post about the possibility of somebody making the transition from blogger to paid spokesperson for awesome books, I remembered how I’d been at Jon Scieszka’s inaugural appearance as the Library of Congress’s first Ambassador for Children’s Literature, with the mission “to evangelize the need for reading” not just among children, but parents and teachers as well. While Scieszka did already have an online platform where he was working to encourage boys to read more—Guys Read—his ambassadorship also involved a lot of public appearances, including book fairs. That, I thought, was something akin to the job description I was fumbling at in that original post—somebody who would always have plenty of great recommendations for books you could read, but who would also be ready to hear you out on the great books you have read, and maybe help spread the word about those books, too.

“Adult” literature does have someone sort of like that in Nancy Pearl, the Seattle librarian who shaped the whole “the whole city reads the same book together” paradigm and went on to become a regular commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition. And in that context, I think it’s worth noting that none of her 2011 holiday recommendations were the “obvious” books; neither, for that matter, had she taken the easy path with her picks for the previous summer. I really like that she’s guiding people to books that they might otherwise not have heard about, or almost certainly would have heard less about—when the highest-profile author on someone’s recommendations list is Stewart O’Nan, you know that they’ve been doing their fieldwork.

I think there’s definitely room for more than one such “ambassador of literature,” though, or maybe for it to be a rotating position. At the Library of Congress, for example, Scieszka was replaced after two years by Katherine Paterson, and now, in early 2012, Walter Dean Myers is stepping into the part. Some early reactions to his appointment have focused on the ways that he might be expected to reach a different audience than previous ambassadors, or whether it’s an endorsement of the alleged trend in “dark” YA fiction, but it seems to me that the ambassador’s fundamental mission hasn’t changed all that much. As Myers himself puts it, “I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life.” And again: “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”

The way the Library of Congress has taken the lead in creating the ambassador’s position, and then sustaining it over the last four years, is inspiring, and I’d love to see some institution put the same kind of effort into a similar position encouraging grown-ups to keep reading, and to keep reading in a very exploratory, adventurous way, as Nancy Pearl is doing in her NPR lists. In my previous post on the subject, I suggested that the Association of American Publishers might want to underwrite a “lobbyist” or “literary evangelist,” which made sense at the time because I was thinking specifically about ways in which the publishing industry could invest in the sustenance and growth of an audience of active readers. But we don’t have to limit ourselves to an industry trade organization.

An argument could be made, for example, that a position of this nature complements the National Book Foundation mission “to recognize the best of American literature [while] raising the cultural appreciation of great writing” through the National Book Awards. You could also make a case that the National Endowment for the Arts, in addition to all the grant dispensation it does “to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation,” could authorize the literary director to get out there and be, as current director (and true mensch) Ira Silverberg) describes himself, “a passionate advocate of literary writers.” There might also be good reasons why neither organization is quite the right fit for what I have in mind—or, maybe, in both cases, what I’m describing already takes place to a certain extent and I need to educate myself about it. That’s a good idea, actually; I’m going to make a note to invite some folks out for some serious conversations in the near future.

6 January 2012 | theory |