Apologies
Some of you might have woken up this morning to a skeleton draft of a review of Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. Last night I hit “publish” instead of “save.” Sorry! The review is written now and posted.
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I'm liking Ron Charles more and more and more, and this video review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom makes just makes me giddy.
Over at Critical Mass, the blog for the NBCC, Wyatt Mason writes about Roth's "tenth, short, and perfect novel, The Ghost Writer." I agree with Mason; this is one great novel, and a great place to start if you're looking to get to know Roth. Here is my review. It wasn't my first Roth, but it is the book that made him one of my favorite writers of all time (if not my favorite).
This promises to get interesting. Anis Shivani of The Huffington Post has posted his list of the fifteen most overrated contemporary American authors. As usual, he makes some great points. Often when I see these, though, I think, "Okay, so they are bad. Now, tell me who is good -- and why the difference." Shivani promises to follow-up with the most underrated contemporary American writers. Followed with similar lists for American writers of the past century, and going further to include lists for the global writers.
Patricia Zohn interviews Jennifer Egan at The Huffington Post. I still think A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the best books of the year.
New York Magazine has a nice look at independent bookstores in the City, which are rising "against all odds."
At Reading Matters, Kim has featured my blog on her Triple Choice Tuesday. My choices? The Ghost Writer, So Long, See You Tomorrow, and Butcher's Crossing. Pop on over and see my fresh, brief write-up of each title.
For Independence Day, the Huffington Post has a slide show of fifteen great independent publishers, featuring a few of my favorites -- Open Letter, Archipelago -- and a few I didn't know about. New Directions is a model of perfection, and I agree. I have stacks and stacks of books from these three presses, and I'm anxious to see what the others have to offer.
Michiko Kakutani's review of Jacob de Zoet is surprising in its lack of substance. It's mostly just a plot rehash (which I think gives away a bit too much). It's boring to read and insightless, where I usually enjoy her reviews even if I disagree (as I do here). I'm not saying my reviews are better, surely, but this is pretty poor for The New York Times daily and from a Pulitzer-winning critic.
In the new issue of The New Yorker, James Wood takes a look at The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: "This is to argue not that David Mitchell should be more like Tolstoy or Conrad or Beckett but, curiously, that he might be more Mitchellian—that the reader wants a kind of moral or metaphysical pressure that is absent, and that has ceded all the ground to pure storytelling."
The Paris Review blog has a Q&A with Jennifer Egan, author of The Goon Squad, a piece of which was published in The New Yorker and discussed here.
Click here for the Never Let Me Go trailer. I didn't like the book as much as I hoped I would, but the trailer makes the film look good.
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2010 Book Awards
2009 Book Awards
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Thank god that hasn’t happened to me (yet). When I think of some of the things I’ve written in draft reviews… *shudder*
I’m with Rob. I have this fear every time I am saving a draft that I’ll hit the wrong button. Sorry, Trevor, but I’m glad it happened to you not me. Then again, it is inevitable that I will make the same mistake eventually.
I did wonder what had happened, but figured it must be something like that.
I’ve put up entries before they had been finally checked, which can be a pain, I think you can take comfort that yours was obviously not yet ready – it’s worse if it’s 80% there in a way because it’s not so obvious it shouldn’t be up yet.
I’ve actually done this several times, usually with a post I’m working on over several days or months (I keep accidentally publishing my year in review of The New Yorker‘s short fiction!). Usually I know what I’ve done immediately and quickly take it down before it gets up on everyone’s RSS feeds. Alas, when the draft is up for an entire night, the oversight sticks in those RSS feeds forever! At least I didn’t publish it in a newspaper! I remember when I was working for a highschool and then college newspaper, I used to be terrified of sending a laid-out page to the printer with the words “Headline Here” or “Write caption here” somewhere on the page. Even worse, publishing those inside jokes we kids used to put in to make our copy-editors mad.
I’m sure you have some interesting stories from the professional world of publishing, Kevin.
Since you ask, Trevor, here are my two favorite “hot-type” stories:
1. When the linotype operator made a mistake, he had to finish the line to get the type out. That’s where “easdfgdfghjkl” etc. came into fashion. Then there was the guy who finished the page one story mistake with “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” and proceeded to take out the wrong line. The union did its job and we never discovered who had actually made the mistake.
2. Even better is that in the good old days pictures and large type were done on the “clichogrpah” and then put on the stone — the cichogrpah would only make images that went half way cross the page. This included the nameplate of the newspaper which ran across the top of page one. One day a somewhat (incompetent, drunk, we will never know) compositor turned “The Medicine Hat News” into “Hat News The Medicine” and no one noticed it until midway through the press run. Those of us who got the paper in Edmonton, some 400 miles away, were much amused.
So, putting up a draft post is hardly a hiccup in the overall scheme of things.
Hi Trevor,
You’re on WordPress right? What you need to do is to add a small plugin to your plugin directory (and activate it of course) called Are You Sure? What it does is simply bring up a confirmation box asking if you’re sure you want to publish.
It works a charm, and has saved me premature posting a few times.
Hope that helps
Rob
Thanks for the stories, Kevin! I definitely have it easy here. And thanks for the plugin recommendation, Rob. That sounds like just the ticket!
Here’s a good newspaper publishing snafu — Back in the day, we used to get reports from church ladies, to be published in the Exeter Times-Advocate. One week, there were six young people who joined the United Church in a “Confirmation” class. The headline in the paper read: Sex Confirmed at United Church.
Thanks for keeping this post alive with an additional snafu, Mary! I love them!