At the
FSG blog, Ryan Chapman has a discussion on the state of book jacket design with three of the best designers out there: Susan Mitchell, Charlotte Strick, and Henry Sene Yee.
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.
This year's
Berkshire Wordfest will be held at the beautiful Edith Wharton estate,
The Mount, on July 23 - 25. I will be going north that weekend, but I will be stopping at
Tarrytown, New York, for some
other fun. Still, a trip to the Berkshires is always pleasant, and a literary festival at Edith Wharton's house is a must if you're available.
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.
The PEN American Center has started its first online book club (
click here for their page). Their first book is Clarice Lispector's
The Hour of the Star, published by the great
New Directions.
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."
KevinfromCanada features
a guest post from Kathleen Winter, author of
Anabel, which KFC also just
reviewed.
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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Click here to see what's happening in the fiction of each issue of The New Yorker.
Last Five Issues:
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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!