big book

"[…] consider the novelist — in this case Donna Tartt, whose first novel, The Secret History, published in 1992, was greeted with critical hosannas and excellent sales. Her follow-up, The Little Friend, was published 10 years later. This means she labored over The Goldfinch, her latest novel, for at least as long. Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there must be periods of self-doubt. To write a novel this large and dense is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting. Especially when there are storms. Suppose, the writer thinks (must think), this is all for nothing? What if I’m failing and don’t know it? What if I make the crossing and am greeted not with cheers but with indifference or even contempt?

     It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of The Goldfinch, they never do."
— Stephen King, The New York Times
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"The horror, the horror..."

 "The recently published horror novel Night Film by Marisha Pessl has this to say about being scared: 'Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are.'
     This is exactly why I write horror. Fear is crucial to my life. It always has been. My list of fears is long and legendary: leeches, ghosts, the Apocalypse, Skeksis, aliens, the coyotes I see skulking down my street at night, swimming in the ocean, a killer hiding in my backseat, basements, cougars, clowns, zombies, abandoned houses, swimming in a quarry, rat hordes, heights, getting lost in a cave like Tom Sawyer, being buried alive, rustling cornfields, pets that come back to life, buckets of pig's blood, reading "The Shining" with a flashlight at three in the morning in the dark in a dead silent house...
     My fear has helped me learn what I'm made of. It has shown me what I am. My list of scary books is not comprehensive, and leaves off some greats like The Road, Perfume, House of Leaves, and several Stephen King titles. But most of the books I mention I first read as an adolescent, and they still haunt me today. Which means something."
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Huffington Post

Find out what's on that list here…

Se a post about Marisha Pessl's latest book Night Film here...

"[…] cheerfully preposterous."

“The Shining is introspective, austere, and unsettlingly plausible, which is why it comes to mind whenever you visit a creepy hotel, play croquet, or see an angry dad with his kid. But [Stephen King's] Doctor Sleep, which feels less like a sequel and more like a spinoff, is unapologetically fun, free-wheeling, and bizarre.

     It’s about a wandering band of psychic vampires who stalk clairvoyant children, kill them, and then inhale their 'steam,' or psychic energy, for food. A grownup Dan Torrance—the little boy from The Shining —must help a young girl fight off these vampires, who have sensed her psychic abilities from afar and have chosen her as their meal of the week. In place of its predecessor’s unsettling familial violence, Doctor Sleep has thrilling gunfights, absurd satanic rituals, and wildly entertaining telepathic showdowns. In a chatty author’s note, King more or less admits that he didn’t try to make Doctor Sleep as terrifying as The Shining: 'Nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare,' he writes, 'especially if administered to one who is young and impressionable.' Instead, he says, he set out to tell 'a kick-ass story.' He succeeded."
— Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
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"... a sweet ride"

"Toronto-based thriller writer Linwood Barclay has many admirers, including such superstars as Michael Connelly, Peter Robinson, Robert Crais and Stephen King, who provided a fulsome blurb for Trust Your Eyes, Barclay’s previous novel, in which he says, among other complimentary things, 'My idea of a sweet ride is three days of rain, a fridge full of snacks, and a new Linwood Barclay.' […]

     In A Tap on the Window, Barclay takes us through low-level drug-dealing, young love, teenage disaffection, corrupt cops, petty thievery, family dysfunction and deeply buried secrets. And, incredibly, to a dark conclusion that ties it all together into a tidy, believable package without even a hint of sentiment.”
— Jack Kirchhoff, The Globe and Mail
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"... lit on fire with excitement"

"… But The Silent Wife [by A. S. A. Harrison] has a striking story behind its publication that makes it an unlikely best seller: In a season that has been dominated by brand-name authors—Khaled Hosseini, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling—Ms. Harrison was a Toronto writer and an unknown, who had never published a novel before. Her book was released as a paperback original, not a hardcover, which is the preferred, more expensive format chosen when a publisher wants a book to make a big splash.

     And in a real-life tragic twist, Ms. Harrison died of cancer in April, only weeks before her book was published. She was 65….
     Samantha Haywood, Ms. Harrison’s literary agent in Canada, said that Ms. Harrison spent much of her career working as an editor and writing nonfiction under the name Susan Harrison.
     Until The Silent Wife, Ms. Harrison’s attempts at fiction had sputtered out. She wrote two novels that Ms. Haywood described as 'cozy mysteries,' but they never sold to a publisher.
     Then Ms. Harrison had the idea for The Silent Wife, with its concept of his-and-hers narratives. 'She was lit on fire with excitement,' Ms. Haywood said. “It was quite fully realized as an idea.'"
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Paper's back

"The idea from the start was to replicate a pleasure from the past – not just the type of stories told in those old books but the physical artifact itself. Painted covers, and not digitally painted ones either. (One of our painters offered to digitally clean up some schmutz on his canvas and I told him I’d break both his arms if he did.) Old typefaces that existed in the hot-metal-type days. Graphic design that isn’t arch or ironic or campy but rather duplicates in a proper and workmanlike fashion what books looked like back in the day.
     Our goal was to give the impression that Hard Case Crime had started publishing sometime around 1945 and just somehow never stopped. We didn’t want to look old-fashioned -- we wanted to look old. And if no one but us gave a damn about books like that, well, fine. We’d publish half a dozen of the things, sell no copies, and hang up our hats proud of a job well done.
     ...Which brings us to Joyland, and the decision to tell readers they’re going to have to read it the old way, as ink on paper, not pixels on a screen. We did wind up expanding beyond just the paperback, though that will still be the book’s true first edition, more than a million copies strong. A bit later, we’ll also put out a tiny hardcover run for collectors, about two thousand copies, featuring special art and other catnip. But that’s it – you’ve got your paperback and you’ve got your hardcover, the same two choices you had for books when Steve was growing up and when I was. There may be an ebook edition down the road, but for now it’s paper or…paper."
— Charles Ardai, bOING bOING
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In June you can get Stephen King's new book Joyland here…

"We are thrilled..."

"Thirty-nine years, 50 books, and 350 million copies into his literary career, Stephen King will discuss the writing life with his son, first-time novelist Owen King on the opening night of the 34th International Festival of Authors.

     In his only scheduled Canadian appearance, Stephen King and his son, Owen King, will headline PEN Canada’s annual benefit to take place on Thursday, October 24th, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. in the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto. Award-winning mystery writer Louise Penny will moderate the discussion.
     'We are thrilled that Stephen and Owen King are supporting the work of PEN,' said Charlie Foran, President, PEN Canada. 'The evening promises to be a rare glimpse of an intimate father-son conversation about life and art.'

 

     Stephen King will present his new novel, Doctor Sleep, which returns to the characters and the territory of his first best-selling hardcover novel, The Shining, including the now middle-aged Dan Torrance. Owen King will present his debut novel, Double Feature, which explores the creative life and the complicated relationship between a B-movie actor and his filmmaking son."
— PEN Canada
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"It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed." — Ram Dass

From: COVERBROWSER

Rejected...
"[...] Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.
    Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.
     George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.
     Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.
     Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.
     The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.
     Lust for Life by Irving Stone was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies.
     John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times. [...]"
— The Girl & Her Books
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Liked because people like it...

"So, why didn’t I read [Stephen] King’s fiction? Was I simply an elitist, anti-populist literary snob who felt he would be soiled by reading stuff that sold? I do have some snob in me — it’s my sense that a lot of the books read by practically nobody are often good, whereas a lot of the books read by millions are often crap — but the term doesn’t fully describe my resistance to King’s fiction. [...]

     My wife felt it was wrong to stand in judgment of people who read fiction in order to escape from life, and I said she was right: I didn’t feel morally superior because I read John Cheever or David Foster Wallace or William Styron or Zadie Smith or Mary Lee Settle instead of Stephen King.
     I did feel, however, that I demanded something different (something more?) from a novel than I guessed most of the readers of Stephen King did. (Not that this made me morally superior, just more demanding, a high-maintenance reader.) Though of course I’d never read a King novel (or story), so maybe I was wrong.
     [...] Why, I wondered again, do some people in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a 'major' contributor to American literary culture? How is it possible that a novel as bloated and mediocre as 11/22/63 is can be deemed by the New York Times Book Review as one of the five best books of fiction of the year? Do we fear being labeled 'elitist' or 'liberal' if we don’t reward commercial success in other ways (as if an enormous advance and a river of royalties are not reward enough)? Or do we believe that commercial success on the King scale signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?"
— Dwight Allen, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Block/Flow/Flood

"Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia — the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers."

— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 500 books, is a classic example. He would sit down and compose 90 words a minute on his typewriter and reportedly never suffered a blocked moment. Everyone thinks of Proust as hypergraphic because he wrote such a long novel over such an extended time. Other writers often described as hypergraphic include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, John Updike, Herman Melville, and Joyce Carol Oates. [...]
     Certain brain conditions can trigger it [hypergraphia], and they all seem to involve the temporal lobes. It was Norman Geschwind [’51] and colleagues who first showed an association between temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s temporal lobe epilepsy almost certainly caused his prolific writing. Just before his seizures, he would enter a state of religious ecstasy in which his world was flooded with meaning. Between seizures, he wrote hypergraphically, often about his struggle with the fact that the periods in which he seemed to experience the highest truths were also the product of a disease."
— Alice Flaherty, in conversation with Paula Byron (Harvard Medical Alumni Journal)
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"[...] the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading." — Marshall McLuhan

From: BookOasis

"Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover.
     Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.
     'When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,' said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. 'It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.'
     The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect."— Julie Bossman, The New York Times
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Sometimes soft is better than hard...

"Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD. [...]
     'It’s definitely making the consumer happy to have the paperback available sooner,' said Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, an independent store. 'If there’s one form of printed book that will survive, if there was only one, it would be the trade paperback.' ”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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"Speaking of Pulp Noir stories, Stephen King wrote a book [...] called The Colorado Kid for Hard Case Crime, a book publisher who embraces the 1950s style pulp crime novel genre. Check out the awesome 1950s cover. Here's a great quote from the press release:
     ' "This is an exciting line of books," Stephen King commented, "and I'm delighted to be a part of it. Hard Case Crime presents good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling, and even though The Colorado Kid is probably more bleu than outright noir, I think it has some of those old-fashioned kick-ass story-telling virtues. It ought to; this is where I started out, and I'm pleased to be back." '
Unfortunately, while the cheap trashy $5 paperback format fits the style, I always prefer hardback books with clean thick acid free paper. The presentation of a book is a big factor in my enjoyment of the book. [...]'
— Mike Shea
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