Culture Surfing

When I was at Book Expo America back in May, one of the “must-grab” pre-publication books (called ARCs, or advance reader copies) handed out like candy was a young adult novel by Justine Larbalestier called Liar, about a young girl whose world of pathological untruths slowly dissolves around the reader. It’s an amazing, dark and disturbing story that leaves pretty much every question unanswered (you may hate that, but it’s the sort of device I can’t get enough of in books, and, for a YA book it’s really heavy and high-level). This is the cover (at right), as done by Larbalestier’s American publisher, Bloomsbury (Liar has already been out for a minute in her native Australia)

Almost immediately upon cracking that book’s spine, though, what you’ll find is that Micah, the teenage girl narrator, is, as the author describes her, “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.“

Anything discordant with that statement when you look at the cover?

Exactly.

I hadn’t started reading Liar when news began to break of Larbalestier’s distaste for what she termed a “whitewashing” of her book,  but when I did, despite the book’s creepily compelling plot and a narrator constantly shifting from reliable to untrustable, that cover, the little white girl with the straight hair and the big eyes, kept pulling me back out. Bleeding-edge New York-based lit critique blog and performance group Fiction Circus took that sense of disconnect all the way to the mat when it caught wind of what was going on:

“If a black cover is an absolute deal-breaker, THEN USE SOME OTHER IMAGE. Like, the word “Liar” up in flames. Or a central image from the text. A broken mirror. ANYTHING. Don’t put a little white girl on the front of your book about a little black girl. It’s going to change people’s ideas about the narrative, which is primarily a story about identity in the first place.”

Continue reading “Bloomsbury’s bad decision turns it into a ‘Liar’” »

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Alice Hoffman: the definition of grumpypants

Get this: apparently, being a New York Times-bestselling author of only occasionally tropey chicklit (but, to be fair, sometimes really awesome fantastical lit-fic) means that you get to act like an utter jerk on the interwebs!

When Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman dared to say things about Alice Hoffman’s new book, The Story Sisters, such as “this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work” or “Admittedly, there are some wonderful passages as the book winds to a close” or other, um, burns and, uh, digs?, on par with those, Hoffman did what any self-respecting author angry at her book’s review would do: She turned to Twitter to extract vengeance on the reviewer.

In a series of 20-some-odd tweets, covered in all their stand-alone glory on Gawker, Hoffman became more and more unhinged, finally posting personal contact info for the reviewer at the Globe, and encouraging folks to contact said reviewer to tell her what they “think of snarky critics.”

Snarky critics, it must be said, who include statements in their reviews such as …”one of my favorite books is her “Illumination Night,’’ which amply displays her gifts of precise prose and the ability to create sympathetic characters.”

Continue reading “Hoff in a Huff” »

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In terms of parenting, bad can be relative.

As bad as she wants to be: Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother

In 2005, when Ayelet Waldman — lawyer/author/wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, probably the best book about comics that I’ll never read, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, probably the best book about the mysteries of Pittsburgh that I’ll never read ) — wrote in a now-infamous article for the New York Times on sex after marriage and childbirth, “I love my husband more than I love my children.” It set off a firestorm (to be polite) of controversy. Condemned from the peaks of every internet mountaintop, from Salon to Gawker, it seemed that the divide between second- and third-wave feminism had finally been united by one common understanding: Ayelet Waldman was a “bad mother.”

In her just-published collection of essays, fittingly titled Bad Mother, Waldman wisely and wittily addresses the “bad mom” issue head-on. Working her way through the uproar around her New York Times piece and her resulting appearance on Oprah, she writes

The Bad Mother police were swiftly on the scene. They speculated publicly, down in the toxic mud of the comments sections on blog pages, that I was crazy, evil, a menace, that my children should be taken away from me.

What Bad Mother ends up showing, though, is the exact opposite. Wisely wrapped in the guise of a self-defense piece is a discussion on what mothering means in today’s society. With razor-sharp incite, Waldman cuts through decades of feminist theory, parenting magazines and societal conceptions by ever-so-subtly counterbalancing arguments with her own, oft-heartbreaking stories of child-rearing, sex, breast feeding, abortion, prenatal care, mother-in-laws and cereal.

Bad Mother’s enraging at times, but also a funny, eye-opening account of what being a “good” or “bad” mother actually means, warts-and-all. It’s the perfect antidote to typical greeting cards-and-chocolate Mother’s Day schlock, so if you forgot to get mom something go grab this. While you’re at the bookstore, also pick up Waldman’s novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. It’s fantastic — except for the end. Don’t say I didn’t warn you on that one.

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"Bound South" author Susan Rebecca White

Atlanta born and bred, Susan Rebecca White’s recently published first novel, Bound South, is a gem of a summer book. Warm and inviting but also laced with deep, biting wit, Bound South is a tale of family, secrets and the constant battle between new south (lowercase) and Old South (in caps, and saying Ma’am). White’s characters are fleshed out beyond belief, to the point of being able to imagine the author with journals upon journals of notes for each, akin to some Stanislavskian theater exercise with prompts like “If your character was a banana, how would he go about unpeeling?” But what resonated most about the story didn’t truly hit me until I spoke to a bookseller in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who was over the moon for Bound South.

“It’s so true to life!” she exclaimed in a thick New York accent, obviously having never spent a day in her life below Pennsylvania.

I then realized Bound South is that rare easy-to-read confection of a Southern novel that transcends location and upbringing.

In preparation for her reading and discussion at the Decatur Public Library tonight at 7:15 p.m. (under the auspice of, and presented by, the Georgia Center For the Book ), Susan and I exchanged a few e-mail questions about very, very Southern things and not very Southern at all things, in equal measure.

Continue reading “Fiction not Bound by the South” »

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Forget the Kindle vs. paper books debate — apparently the days of actually “writing” a “book” are slowly coming to an end. You know, craft, art, substance(s), the actual minutia that all go into making a book a piece of work — it’s all becoming as outdated as banks crash, attention spans diminish, and robots begin serving us dinner in capsule form (OK, that last one won’t happen ’til 2011). In this new cultural landscape, we will need leaders, like the Jonas Brothers, to rise up and, with a firm hand, guide us to new levels of social media interactivity. Fortunately David Pogue, New York Times columnist and author of many books that teach your grandmother how to check e-mail on her eMac, is here to save us via his forthcoming The World According To Twitter.

From the blog of Pogue (David Pogue, not the Pogues the band, because you know very well that I’d heap high praise on anything penned by Shane MacGowan):

It all started with a live demo of Twitter. During a talk, I was trying to demonstrate the real-time nature of Twitter. On stage, I typed: “Anyone got a pun that can fit in 140 characters?” Your responses started flowing within 10 seconds….

Wait, wait, dear Culture Surfer reader, don’t check out yet, it gets better (in the way that “better” means “worse”):

Next, I posted a picture of a squirrel in my yard, and asked for captions. You turned out to be the wittiest caption writers ever!

(Oh, sorry, I added that exclamation point up there. It just needed it, didn’t it?)

That was it. I knew my mission in life: to compile and edit a whole book of (Twitter) responses, written by my 200,000 followers.

(As you can see, that is not actually the real cover of David Pogue’s book that you wrote for him)

In today’s collapsing publishing landscape this book screams both timely and vital. I’ll be greatly looking forward to Pogue’s well-thought-out treatise on Friendster soon!

No, really, all snark aside, this sort of attempt at an of-the-minute cash-grab really irks me. While publishers, authors and other various incidental folk in the book business are actually working, diligently and full of heart, to discover what it’s going to take to turn the sinking ship of books around, Pogue’s trying to ramp up excitement for 200 pages of @SomeGuy tweeting “hey I really like dogs.”

And speaking of @someguy — if you, lucky you, end up being selected to be a part of Pogue’s scam project, you certainly get compensated, right?

Of course you do. Per Pogue himself, he’ll send you “a free copy of the book, inscribed to you personally.”

Oh, wow, lucky day!

Continue reading “@heywritemybookforme” »

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TOM FOOLERY: Go forth and multiply, Dan Brown.

Did you hear the world stop yesterday, when, for a moment, the moon and the sun were both eclipsed by a giant ray of angels singing “Hallelujah!”, but remixed to sound something akin to Madonna’s “Ray Of Light?”

If you didn’t, then you obviously missed the announcement of what will, in fact, save the sinking ship that is the publishing industry:

Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code (you know, the book about Jesus gettin’ it on with Tom Hanks, or something, I don’t know I never read it) finally finished his new novel.

From GalleyCat:

After years of delay and anticipation, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group will release Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” this September with an initial print run of five million copies.
(Emphasis added. Russ note: Folks, that’s a LOT of books. Starving children in Africa will each be able to have their very own first edition first printing.)

The new novel is a follow-up to the “The Da Vinci Code,” the bestselling adventure that sold 81 million copies worldwide.

The novel, which will be available for purchase at your local airport bookstore, grocery store and probably McDonalds on Sept. 15, will likely continue in Brown’s legacy of “speculative thriller” by focusing on the year 2012, “the much ballyhooed Mayan date for the end of the world.”

Already on Twitter, the topic of conversation among publishing industry types is what sort of bookstore tidal wave will be unleashed around the magic 9/15 publication date for the book your uncle won’t be able to stop bothering you to read. As of right now, one of the only authors brave enough to take Brown’s release date on with her own work is Joyce Carol Oates.

That’s a cage match I’d pay good money to see. (My money’d be on Oates. I hear she’s feisty.)

(Photo by Simon Mein/Columbia Pictures)

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