ThreeGuys1Book has 1605 followers | By Jason Chambers  Greetings from BEA! Today is education day, so no walking the floor, but I’ve isolated quite a few sessions that 3G1B readers will be interested in and, I hope, will generate some interesting discussion on what’s going on in the book business right now. I’ll check back in later with photos and comments. So far, here are a few sessions I’m looking forward to: Getting authors to the social media party: ostensibly for publishers, it wouldn’t hurt most authors to jump on board this session and learn why and how to use social media without killing the whole day on Twitter. Continue reading Greetings from BEA By Dennis Haritou  The unknown is in the house and it’s your own child. This story is beautifully terraced as BW piles on closely observed detail after detail about what these suburban blocks look like, sound like, feel like…until this becomes your neighborhood, your block, your house. But in a parallel movement, the more palpably real the setting becomes the more frighteningly unknown Carl becomes. Continue reading Brad Watson’s Carls Outside By Jason Rice  I stumbled across Fall River and Other Uncollected Stories recently, and was thrilled to discover other Cheever stories that I’d not read. Being a Cheever virgin until last winter, it is nice to discover more from the man. “Suburban Fabulist”, again, tossing words like that around, for me, is useless. Fall River appeared in a left wing experiemental magazine called The Left in 1931. I believe it takes place in Fall River, MA, where industry once reigned supreme, and now is only home to empty factories, and a battle ship that never leaves port. Continue reading Fall River by John Cheever By Jason Chambers  Am I crazy to predict an upbeat vibe at BEA this year? Maybe it’s just the circles I run in—fiercely independent publishers, whip-smart booksellers and hungry novelists, but I’m sensing a little optimism. And why not? There’s a lot of good books dropping this year, both from the corporates and the indies (see our Spring Indie Preview, if you haven’t already). I say: Screw all the bad news. Screw the downward spiral. Let’s celebrate books before they’re obsolete. That’s a joke (sort of). Continue reading Call me nutty, but I love a trade show By Jason Rice  In Natalie Edwards mini book, Crop Milk, we’re blistered with statistics about food-borne illness, and who is the biggest offender of the well known family restaurants. I like this kind of stuff, I want to know more, and it’s nice to learn something. Which is more than I already know, don’t eat anything you haven’t prepared. I did not know, however, of the rare violation that Waffle House has committed called ‘Pigeon Grill’, where a pigeon actually lives under the grill where the eggs, hamsteaks and other breakfast items are prepared. Now, I know pigeons don’t live under grills, I’m not stupid, but Waffle House is a restaurant located primarily in the South, where, things can and do go sideways. Continue reading Crop Milk by Natalie Edwards By Dennis Haritou  How can you take Brad Watson? How can you read stories that can make you so uncomfortable? A writer told me that depicting emotions is difficult. But there’s this great parallelism in the Aliens stories. It’s as if you had three mimes up on the stage. The most histrionic, tall and thin, represents your feelings. The second, more deliberate and circumscribed, represents your thoughts. The third mime, the most athletic, dressed in a track suit, represents your actions. They do improv. Now, that’s you. Continue reading Terrible Argument by Brad Watson By Jason Rice  Your heart will break when you read the sizzling story “As Much Below As Up Above”, a story that is weird and clunky, even heavy, as it’s structured with such magnificence. Our narrator is a Russian with a great command of the English language, and he’s retelling a story of his own demise while sitting on the beach watching people wade in and out of the ocean. The story leaps off the page as we wander around our hero’s mind as he dreams of his girlfriend Mina, and his former life on a Russian submarine that has meet with a nasty end. We meet his family, his father made doors, which, pardon the pun, opens the story wide, and we get to read some of the stunning writing and reasons why our hero loves the sea. Continue reading The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy By Jason Rice  Today at the Center for Fiction (17 east 47th street) from 6pm to 8pm, there is a book launch party for this book. Almost all of the authors who are collected in this fantastic collection of sex and crimes stories will be on hand, so check out this event, and you might see, Madison Smartt Bell, Lawrence Block, Stephen L. Carter, Lee Child, Jonathan Lethem, Laura Lippman, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Santlofer, Edmund White…and possible others. Continue reading The Dark End of the Street Book Launch By Dennis Haritou  There is a schism here between women’s fiction and guy reads, isn’t there? I know that Goodman is interested in pulverizing Amanda to the bone in order to see what she can make of this character. So there is storytelling sense in having Amanda both jilted and fired. But it’s harder for me to imagine a story where the guy gets jilted and tries to recover. Guys wouldn’t read a story like that. They don’t ever want to see themselves as victims. They want to commit the act, even if it involves wrongdoing. Anything rather than be the sufferer. But women, it seems to me, will eat up a story like La Vita Nuova alive. Continue reading La Vita Nuova by Allegra Goodman By Jason Rice  Everything about this story is non linear, which confirms what I already knew, that kind of story telling not only works, but it something that can sell. We’re treated to a pulp flash back and flash forward as Mandel introduces us to a half dozen characters right out of the gate, and she hints at something bad, like a subtle kind of noir, which isn’t ashamed of it’s pulp origins, Mandel is flexing her cinematic influences (the rights to this should be scooped up) and her love of someone like Jim Thompson. Continue reading The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel | |
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