Fantagraphics Saved From Ellison Menace

(Illustration by Dan Clowes, courtesy Fantagraphics.) 

As we reported back in March, local publisher Fantagraphics has been embroiled in a lawsuit with California sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison. He sued for defamation last September, the latest chapter in a conflict now some 27 years old. Fanta co-founder Gary Groth (pictured above) took a hard-line First Amendment position in response, arguing that in a forthcoming oral history of the company, he and others should be able to express their opinions—about Ellison and others—freely. As Groth told me this spring, "There was no reason to refrain from speaking truthfully; that's what the First Amendment is there for. My commitment as a publisher and a journalist is to speak truthfully and not assuage Harlan Ellison's ego."

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Fall Books! A Preview

The last day of BookExpo, Sunday, I inexplicably made it out of bed in time to see Rosie O'Donnell, Alice Sebold and Ian McEwan at the Sunday authors' breakfast. Rosie O'Donnell was pimping Celebrity Detox, which she was originally going to publish in 2002 before deeming it "uncooked."
But now the former co-host of The View says "we had to change the epilogue... and I will be available for book store signings." Celebrity Detox will follow O'Donnell's experiences in and out of the public eye, getting a sense for whether or not she, knowing that fame was like a drug, could relearn how to manage it into her life, as an alcoholic would relearn how to drink, "sip and not chug." (Short answer: no.)

Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, proceeded to thank booksellers on behalf of her and her husband for "paying off our student loans and buying us a house." (Nice way to say it, considering the book has already sold a reported 10 million copies, and Peter Jackson is currently shopping around his screenplay based on the book.)

Ian McEwan, author of the recently-released On Chesil Beach, opened by quoting some public speaking advice by Herodotus: "'A man should never speak for longer than he can make love.' And so, I thank you." Yes, he killed.

Sunday is the stereotypically 'dead' conference day, in which it wouldn't be completely out of place for a Random House executive to show up drunk and in jeans. And so, it was a good day to wander around and get a sense for a brief selection of what Seattleites will be reading in the coming months.

August:
The Chicago Way, by Michael Harvey.
About: Some sort of murder in Chicago involving a "tough-talking Irish cop"; Harvey is the co-creator and executive producer of Cold Case Files.
First sentence: "I was on the second floor of a three-story walk-up on Chicago's North Side."
Sales prediction: Outlook pretty good.

September:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.
About: The local's first YA novel is a "coming-of-age" novel featuring illustrations by Ellen Forney.
First sentence: "I was born with water on the brain."
Sales prediction: a huge hit amongst the awkward Native American teen crowd, with some crossover potential.

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else, by Michael Gates Gill.
About/first sentence: "This is the true, surprising story of an old white man who was kicked out of the top of the American Establishment, by chance met a young African-American woman from a completely different background, and came to learn what is important in life."
Sales prediction: So, Tom Hanks is starring in the movie adaption, right? What'll that and a Starbucks cross-promotion get you, like 3 copies?

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson.
About: An American, William "Skip" Sands, a spy-in-training going against the Viet Cong; his uncle's a CIA vet. Lots of men, war, desert scenes (the uncle's from Houston), and the kind of gritty/emotivescenes Johnson's known for.
First sentence: "Last night at 3 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed."
Sales prediction: Sales? Not bad, but the advance edition of this sucker practically came with a "nominated for a crapload of prizes" logo on the cover.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.
About: see above. The first full-length novel from the author of the much-ballyhooed short story collection, Drown.
First sentence: "They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles."
Sales prediction: king amongst Dominicans, but my lord there's a bit of competition this September.

October:
The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold.
About: Twenty-four hours following Helen Knightly, 49, who murders her mother.
First sentence: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." (i.e., I didn't spoil anything.)
Sales prediction: Amazon.com probably already pre-ordered it for you and a few million of your closest friends. And let me say, though it's nostalgic and Sebold is no Beckett, woman can plot. It's right up the Bones book club alley, and I was on page 30 by the time I reached my subway stop after coming back from the conference.

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My BEA Diaries

10:32 a.m. Though she's not scheduled to be interviewed for another half-hour, Nancy Pearl arrives downstairs with Lauren Silverberg from Sasquatch Books. "She's a very time-oriented person," says Silverberg later that day. "And she likes talking to people."

11:45 a.m. University Bookstore's Events Coordinator, Stesha Brandon, starts talking about all of the things she has planned in September for Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer. "We're going to have food and Baroque music!" she screams. "And that author is only 25!" That author, mind you, is also an editor at Seed magazine and a Rhodes Scholar.

12:20 p.m. While having a small $8.25 turkey sandwich in the oversized food court, I'm greeted by a member of the Random House sales staff who works exclusively with Barnes and Noble. He's one of eleven members of the Random House staff whose sole job is to sell books to Barnes and Noble. Eleven! I say. He then starts talking with his friend from Barnes and Noble, a bookseller in charge of buying humor titles for the entire bohemoth chain.

2:10 p.m. Seattle's Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time, signs copies of his National Book Award-winning paperback, for fans. Considering that his book came out last year, there's a considerable line—long enough for Carla Gray (who works for his publisher, Houghton Mifflin), to take snapshots like a proud mother. ON the side, Jill Adams watches. (The professional affiliation on Adams' name tag should be some sort of indication of the ass-kissing that follows her around: OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB.)

2:47 p.m. I run into Bob Redmond from Bumbershoot at the Fantagraphics booth. "We're off-season," he says, sighing, of the mild difficulty he's had in booking a few of the authors he really wanted at this year's festival. "And others want $15,000 for an appearance." I suggest getting a few lesser-known authors drunk, giving them boxing gloves and having a fundraising match for Fantagraphics.
The independent "Publisher of the World's Greatest Cartoonists" is still raising funds to cover legal costs that continue to pile up after the defamation suit filed by Harlan Ellison. Alongside their fall catalog and promotional bookmarks, copies of a postcard, "Fantagraphics and the 1st Amendment," are distributed with suggestions on how to help.
"There is a mediation meeting on June 28th," says Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds. "From what I understand, if it's going to work out, it'll happen that day. Or it'll go back to being a slow, arduous process... that might take five years."

3:20 p.m. At a panel discussion on debut fiction titles for the fall, Miramax's Rob Weisbach tries to explain what it is that gives certain books more "buzz" than others. "I don't mean to get to Jungian on you, but there is something to be said about the collective unconscious... You fall in love. I don't know, can you explain love?"

4:13 p.m. I talk with Lauren Silverberg of Sasquatch Books, which was recently asked by the National Parks Service to remove its logo from the cover of Backtracking: By Foot, Canoe and Subaru Along the Lewis and Clark Trail by Ben Long.
Between the Fantagraphics lawsuit and the question of how, exactly, an independent publisher goes about removing something from the cover of a book that's already been printed, I have to ask myself: why is it always the small companies who seem to face these problems, rather than a larger one that could more easily soften the blow?

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My BEA Diaries

My BEA Diaries

10:15 a.m. An Amazon.com panel on digital book sales, the entire hour, no less, consists of telling small press of their dire need to register for Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature, and how others can SITB themselves. "People enjoy looking a few pages in," said one of the corporation's lead cheerleaders, before telling them about Amazon's new Upgrade service. (It gives customers the chance to buy an additional, second digital version of their book on top of the dead-tree version; one-third were aware of it, but no one was signed up for the service.)
"Just as people enjoy browsing through books in the store, they do in an online store." A few small press owners look confused and nervous.

11:46 a.m. Christopher Hitchens—who will appear at Town Hall on June 7th—appears on a panel on the Ethics of Book Reviewing, sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle. When asked of his overall philosophy on book reviewing, he quotes the book of Job: "Oh, that mine enemy would write a book." His latest book, God is Not Great, will appear as the #1 best-selling nonfiction book in this Sunday's New York Times Best Sellers list.

2:26 p.m: In between laughing hysterically with a few publicists, Sherman Alexie signs copies of Flight in the Hachette Book Group for Young Readers area. Alexie reads here in NY at the Barnes and Noble Union Square on Monday, June 4th.

3:46 p.m. A panel on "Reaching Your Audience" turns into yet another advertisement for Amazon.com. The company is using its extensive digital infrastructure to host video, sound, and image searches; a clip from Wallstrip, a video blog show in which "pop culture meets stock culture," asks the irreverent and leading question, "Is Amazon the new Google?" A few men from the Orwellian-sounding Kanbay Research Institute continue by stating the fundamental uselessness of competing with Amazon.com's traffic.
"I think Powell's sells their books online," says one. "But you don't want to compete with their numbers. You want to embrace the web."

The gleeful-corporate-consensus-as-invigorating-self-fulfillment attitude was all too pervasive earlier, at the Starbucks panel. If people are already spending their money here, why not buy their books here? What's wrong with that when we're all in the publishing industry? What's wrong with corporate conglomerates is the increasingly monolithic avenues through which people buy books.

"Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders—those are all that matter," says an editor at the Hachette Book Group, speaking on behalf of anonymity.

"It's kind of scary," says a publicist for McSweeney's. 

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My BEA Diaries

10:15 a.m. I attend an Amazon.com panel on digital book sales. The entire hour, no less, consists of telling small press of their dire need to register for Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature, and how others can SITB themselves. "People enjoy looking a few pages in," said one of the corporation's lead cheerleaders, before telling them about Amazon's new Upgrade service. (It gives customers the chance to buy an additional, second digital version of their book on top of the dead-tree version; one-third were aware of it, but no one was signed up for the service.)
"Just as people enjoy browsing through books in the store, they do in an online store." A few small press owners look confused and nervous.

11:46 a.m. Christopher Hitchens—who will appear at Town Hall on June 5th—appears on a panel on the Ethics of Book Reviewing, sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle. When asked of his overall philosophy on book reviewing, he quotes the book of Job: "Oh, that mine enemy would write a book." His latest book, God is Not Great, will appear as the #1 best-selling nonfiction book in this Sunday's New York Times Best Selling list.

2:26 p.m: Sherman Alexie signs copies of Flight in the Hachette Book Group for Young Readers area. Alexie reads here at the Barnes and Noble Union Square on Monday, June 4th.

3:48 p.m.: A panel on Reaching Your Audience turns into yet another advertisement for Amazon.com. The company is using its extensive digital infrastructure to host video, sound, and image searches; a clip from Wallstrip, a video blog show in which "pop culture meets stock culture," asks the irreverent and leading question, "Is Amazon the new Google?" A few men from the Orwellian-sounding Kanbay Research Institute continue by stating the fundamental uselessness of competing with Amazon.com's traffic.
"I think Powell's sells their books online," says one. "But you don't want to compete with their numbers. You want to embrace the web."

The gleeful-corporate-consensus-as-invigorating-self-fulfillment attitude was all too pervasive earlier, at the Starbucks panel. If people are already spending their money here, why not buy their books here? What's wrong with that when we're all in the publishing industry? What's wrong with corporate conglomerates is the increasingly monolithic venues through which books are bought and sold.
"That's just kind of scary, that everyone is basically buying their books from a few places," said an editor at a small press, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
"Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and Borders—those are all that count," said an editor at the Hachette Book Group.

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Thursday night at BookExpo

Tomorrow, BookExpo, the nation's largest publishing convention, kicks off in New York's Javits Center. This comes soon after the demise of the LA Times Book Review section and a full-time books editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the Chicago Tribune recently moved its book section to the Saturday paper in a cost-cutting move.
What are we to make of the discrepancy between fewer places for criticism while more books continue to be published—172,000 in 2005 alone?
Tonight, Bookforum hosted "The Intellectual History and Culture of the Book Review" at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York for members of the NBCC, which I was fortunate enough to attend. The crowd was an elbow patch-wearing, ethnic necklace-donning set; eyeglasses were strikingly common. They were nerds and proud of it; a guy from n+1 was there and ultimately asked, "Who are our heroes?" Need I say more?

The editor of Bookforum, Eric Banks, moderated a panel including Columbia professor James Shapiro (who teaches a class on criticism), Joyce Carol Oates, the National Book Award winner who who recently published her 53rd novel, Harvard University Press's Lindsay Waters, and Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Soon after National Book Critics Circle President John Freeman (dapper as always in a pinstripe suit) introduced the panel, Lindsay Waters rushed in with an effusive plea to save the book review. Perhaps his caffeine and passion had found each other, as he ended: "We really will be killing off the plankton if we let the book review die... that's what at stake: everything." He spoke of letting critics free and giving them breathing room, of the history of the newspaper and the integration of arts reporting and criticism into daily discourse.
Next, FSG's Galassi insisted that "book reviews are in trouble because newspapers are in trouble." That the internet is allowing us to focus on our interests and niches has created a generation of consumers who go online already knowing what they want to read, buy and what circles they want to inhabit.

While Columbia's Shapiro was more even-handed, less apocalyptic, he added that "you don't get a mentorship with a blog." He was also fairly skeptical of any of the reviews in the New York Times finding their way into the literary canon, especially with their recent reduction from 1400 to 1100 words. He was more afraid for the burgeoning generation of book critics under 30: with less pay, fewer places to work, would there even be any book critics in 20 years?

This was, in other words, a slightly skewed version of the Pop Conference at EMP, the conference of music writers and academics, which I attended last month. Gate-keepers of the old school, trumpeting the demise of the paper and its implicit authority, gave heartfelt talks about why people on the internet were ruining culture.
I was surprised, then, to hear Joyce Carol Oates applaud some of her favorite literary blogsters, stating that their tone, a new, inviting tone, was reassuring and welcoming. Harvard University's Lindsay Waters also admitted that he'd read some brilliant things online (though he also made a joke about tantric sex, which I strongly discourage unless told in conjunction with a joke about Sting).
Is her good spirit one of the reasons why she has 53 novels under her belt and seems young as ever? Though it's easy to throw your hands up and say that no one's reading anymore—or that no one's talking about it in an intelligent and sustained fashion—that's just lazy. It's not true! While that's one topic that panels at BookExpo will be discussing this weekend, there are so many people and institutions currently at work diversifying and throwing life jackets out to the publishing industry. This weekend I'll be looking into the more relevant matters of criticism, as well as taking notes on what local companies like Amazon.com and Starbucks are up to.
And at least for one night, there was a fairy tale ending. After the panel, everyone went across the street and got quite drunk on rose.

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Al Gore in Seattle next Monday

I don't often get late-breaking arts news, so here you go: Just added to Town Hall's schedule, Gore will be here to discuss his new book The Assault on Reason, "an indictment of current policy making, especially the President's use of power and his handling of the war. . . the use of fear and the misuse of faith, the distractions of our entertainment culture, and the concentration of power in the national media and the executive branch." Monday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets, $5, go on sale tomorrow (Thurs.) at 10 a.m. via www.brownpapertickets.com.

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Harry Potter mania!

An hour ago, local bookselling outfit Amazon.com announced that pre-orders of the final book in the Harry Potter septology, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, have crossed the one million mark. It only took the title (which drops July 21st) 95 days of pre-ordering madness to reach this landmark.

I'm not saying that this is the end of the world. Kids should read! And while adults should be reading, too, it honestly couldn't hurt to try reading something new, something new-ish, or something old.

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Good things happen in threes!

Why do things always happen in clusters? I'm sure a physicist would have a decent molecular-level explanation, but I can find no such logic when it comes to events. And yet, it always friggin' happens.

For example, I'm screwed tonight because there are three reading-type events taking place that I need to get to:
Atul Gawande's essays in The New Yorker always make me grateful that there are doctors who haven't yet taken to seeing all humans as mere machines and objects; he's reading from his new book, Better, at the Seattle Public Library. And yes, it's great.
Chuck Palahniuk is reading at Town Hall from his new book, Rant. I'm sure Palahniuk fans will love it. Last time I saw him read, he threw rubber limbs at audience members who correctly answered trivia questions. He was funny and charming and smart—yet really nerdy and eager to please, much like the time Crispin Glover's character in Back to the Future became an author.
And finally, Milton Love, author of Probably More Than You Want to Know About Fishes of the Pacific Coast will be giving a lecture, "Illegal in Six Southern States: Tales of Fish Sex," at REI.
"In this R-rated frolic, the aptly named Dr. Love takes us on a roller coaster ride through the sordid underbelly of piscine reproduction," the press release says of the research marine biologist.

Who am I kidding? I'll see you at REI!

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Everybody Reads

In case you haven’t heard, the city’s collective book club is back and reading The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies.

City librarian Deborah Jacobs was on hand earlier this week to give City Council their copies and drum up interest. “The novel explores the universal theme of the immigrant experience and how it varies for first and second generations and for the couple,” she said.

There were nods and smiles all around, but only Council member Richard Conlin committed. He announced that his book club has already voted to read it.

Council president Nick Licata wanted to know how the book was chosen, but Jacobs was cagey. “A group of librarians and independent booksellers decide,” she said.

“That must be an interesting discussion,” said Licata.

If there’s internal politics and arm-twisting involved, Jacobs wasn’t going to let on. She jumped to the history: Seattle was the first city to try the group-thing in 1998 and the idea is now being copied in more than 500 cities and towns.

“Who knew?” she said. “At the time we wondered if anyone would come, if anyone would read it. Now it’s exploded.”

Better get busy. City-wide events start next month.

…Or, for the underachievers, transplants, what-have-you, cheat and see the movie.

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