Kevin Allman

New book review: Paul Beatty's "Slumberland"

I have a review of Paul Beatty's fun new novel Slumberland in the Sunday Washington Post.

Another self-published book becomes a bestseller

I'm a sucker for stories about people who self-publish their books and somehow, against all odds, manage to find success. In today's New York Times, Motoko Rich writes about William P. Young, a former hotel night clerk who self-published his novel The Shack, and found it move from Christian bookstores to, well...

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, The Shack had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even Mr. Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

Its publisher, Windblown Media, a company that was formed expressly to publish The Shack in May of last year, estimates that the book has sold more than one million copies.

The article says that Young filed for bankruptcy and lost his house at auction a few years back, and that "with proceeds from book sales, he has been able to pay several bills."

Entertainment Weekly's "new classics"

Entertainment Weekly has published one of those all-lists issues that claims to identify "The New Classics" in various genres of the arts; their list of the Top 100 books of the last 25 years is here.

As usual, it's plenty silly and there's lots of room for argument, starting with the complete omission of Richard Ford (not my favorite, but probably better than 25% of the writers on the list). Probably more egregious, to me: not one Richard Russo title? Scott Turow, yes, but Walter Mosley, no? (Credit where credit is due: it's great to see Ruth Rendell there.)

Can one really argue a spot for Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and not Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, or Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End?

Whatever. After all, EW's "Top 100" TV list manages to squeeze in Baywatch, Saved By the Bell, and The Bachelor, but omits Hugh Wilson and Tim Reid's masterpiece Frank's Place, which should not only make the list, but be in the Top 10. That's as big a mistake as any of the literary ones. Come to think of it, it is a literary mistake.

New review: David Guterson's "The Other"

I have a review of David Guterson's new novel, The Other, in today's book section of The Oregonian.

Books at Jazz Fest

Great piece by Susan Larson, books editor at The Times-Picayune, about the booksigning tent at this year's Jazz Fest...including the story of Hunter S. Thompson and the golf cart.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the video

Journalist Harry Allen has uncovered a fascinating piece of the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer puzzle: a video that seems to be a promotional vehicle for her now-discredited memoir Love and Consequences:

These days, publishers often commission promo videos to be posted on MySpace or YouTube; I don't know if they really help sales, but they're cheap to produce and they can't hurt. As Harry explains:

It seems to have been shot as part of a companion “electronic press kit,” or EPK, for the disgraced author’s quickly-canceled book tour and publicity campaign. (In the wake of the outrageous controversy, Riverhead recalled all of the 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences it had previously shipped, from a 24,000 total copies printed, the sum of which were then certainly pulped.)

Harry's shrewd, funny analysis of the video is well worth reading (and you've got to see the picture of Sister Souljones' high school graduation pic to believe it), but I'm not sure the vid was shot in South Central L.A., as he hypothesizes. It's certainly not Eugene, Ore. -- the palm trees in the background are pure L.A. -- but the tract houses in the background are more Brady Bunch than Watts (check the spiffy landscaping and the lack of bars on the windows).

The biggest "tell" in the whole thing, though, is the fact that Jones/Seltzer just sits there for all 10 minutes of the video. I've seen a lot of these publishers' promos, and they usually involve an author walking around, telling stories from their memoirs on the sites where the stories occurred.

Jones/Seltzer couldn't walk around and bring her story to life -- because it was an easily disprovable pack of lies. No street corner locations where she dealt rock; no battered-but-humble family home where "Big Mama" dished out neckbones and homespun wisdom in equal measure. So she just sits there like she was being interviewed on the Today show, a white woman in front of some well-kept houses, talking in vague generalities about education and "potential" and inspiration.

It makes me wonder what it would take for Riverhead to have smelled a rat in this story -- or, indeed, in how much denial the publisher was willing to engage not to smell a rat.

Anne Rice: she's baaaack...

...or so she tells Time magazine this week:

"One more book." Those are the words Anne Rice fans have been dying to hear about the Vampire Chronicles ever since her shocking — and dismaying to many of his followers — turn to religious writing. Long seen as a committed atheist, four years ago the best-selling author drove a stake through the hearts of her followers when she vowed to abandon her sinister stories and instead write only of the Lord.

Turns out, vampires aren't that easy to kill. In an interview with TIME, the best-selling author of Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned, has revealed that she plans to write one last book about Lestat, the feared, yet beloved, blood-sucking main character in her gothic novel series. "When I published my first book about the Lord I said I would never write about those characters again," Rice acknowledged. "But I have one more book that I would really like to write. It will be a story that I need to tell."

This must be great news to her legions of vampire fans, who I don't think have embraced her Christian novels with the same brio that they did the Lestat books. (Her latest, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out next month, and I doubt that this announcement on the eve of its publication was a coincidence.)

I'm not a Rice fan, but I'm not a detractor, either. That said, I reviewed two of her last Vampire books, and they were just Too Much -- too much description, too much melodrama, too much everything. By page 500, I had verbal gout. This excerpt from my review of 1998's The Vampire Armand in The Washington Post holds up pretty well, and sums up her latter-day vampire career:

As usual, it’s not just the epic plot, but Rice’s voluptuary worldview that’s the main attraction. Not many writers can shift from ruminations on Christianity into casual homoeroticism without stripping their gears, but Rice does it with ease. Elegant narrative has always been her hallmark; she glops on juicy, rococo descriptions as if they were scoops of whipped cream. And her talent for describing Gothic interiors down to the last bibelot and objet d’art makes her the Martha Stewart of the Charles Addams set.

Not all of Armand works this well. At times, Rice’s loamy dialogue veers into Barbara Cartlandisms (“Your face is as a jewel given me, which I can never forget, though I may foolishly lose it. Its glister will torture me forever.”). And when Rice brings these florid folk to modern-day New Orleans, she dilutes both the power of their personae and the power of the narrative; these characters seem too overripe for even the most elegantly decadent of American cities.

That said: I really hope that the story she "has" to tell somehow involves her vampires during and after Hurricane Katrina, because if there was ever a backdrop for her brand of sorrow and excess, that's it. I was at a Borders on Saturday and came across a table groaning with newly published Katrina books; a few looked interesting, but not one of them compelled me to buy it. But the dead souls of the Rice cosmology mingling with the dead souls in Katrina's wake: there are a lot of possibilities there. It could be a late-career shot in the arm...or it could be a huge mess. But read it? You bet I would.

Just don't let Tom Cruise anywhere near the project.

Hitting the publishing jackpot

Fledgling novelist Brunonia Barry self-published her book, The Lace Reader, in July. It picked up some good reviews, including one in Publishers Weekly.

A few publishers took notice.

And William Morrow just bought the rights to it, and her next book. For $2 million.

Augusten Burroughs: I'm no James Frey

The Running With Scissors lawsuit has been settled out of court:

A family that claimed author Augusten Burroughs defamed them in his best-selling book "Running with Scissors" has settled a lawsuit against the author and his publisher, their attorney said Wednesday.

Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin's Press, agree to call the work a "book" instead of "memoirs," in the author's note and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family's memories of events he describes "are different than my own," and expressing regret for "any unintentional harm" to them, according to Howard Cooper, an attorney for the family. He said financial terms of the settlement are confidential.

Both sides are claiming victory; Burroughs has more on his blog.

It's an interesting question. I've never read a memoir where details haven't been changed, names obscured, events compressed, etc. So when does a memoir stop being a memoir and morph into fiction?

The Oprah liar: out of a job

Yesterday I wrote about the self-published author who claimed falsely that Oprah Winfrey had selected his book for her TV book club. Today comes the news that he's quit his job:

The author says he’s "ready for a new challenge," but would not elaborate on what prompted him to step down.

The "new challenge" being, presumably, telling the truth. He also acknowledges "an error in judgment." So that's what they're calling it these days.

Ah, well: all the more time for TV appearances when Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart's bookers come a-callin'.