Showing posts with label New Rivers Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Rivers Press. Show all posts

Thursday, August 14, 2014

In Good Company: 2014 New Rivers Press Books

Am very proud (and not a little relieved) to report that the New Rivers Press Electronic Book Series did not perish under my influence. In fact, the number of titles has now tripled.

This year’s winners include Click, a novel by Rebecca Cook, and Up the Hill, a collection of stories by James Calvin Schaap. The opening of Click propels you into the story at astonishingly lyrical speed, with great lines like “a face just to the left of lovely.” Schaap’s stories, by contrast, proceed with the measured grace of a voice from beyond the veil. As one narrator notes, “we're fluid up here.”

 

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

South Florida Takes Notice of A Novel

Well, maybe notice is too optimistic a word, but the book did receive a little press while I was working in Mongolia. Pompano Today, a regional magazine (you can find the complete file here), published this interview:


And earlier in the summer, the Key West Citizen ran this bit:


Sunday, June 2, 2013

A First Novel after Fifty . . .

I've spent the past few decades proving that I'm no prodigy, with some success. My first short story did not appear in print until I was thirty-one, and that first article in the New York Times did not arrive until I reached forty.

John McPhee, by contrast, published at least fifteen books before age fifty. Very good books, written at what he considers a painstakingly slow pace.

Such comparisons are silly, of course, but if you read a lot, and spend many hours in bookstores, it's hard not to wonder at one's own insufficiencies.

Now that I've been lucky enough to pass fifty—and see my first novel available on Amazon—I discover that no less an authority than the BBC has declared that "fifty is the perfect age to write a novel."

It's a questionable pronouncement, based on this lone statistic: "the average age of writers who topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List from 1955–2004 was 50.5 years." Which means, by my calculations, that the actual writing must have occurred when the author's average age was quite a bit less than fifty.

But the reason I bring all this up boils down to one word: hope. Anyone who knows me well will attest to the fact that I am easily distracted. This is not to say that I don't work very hard, only that my mind is quick to focus on the next item of interest, which is equally likely to be a poem or a paragraph, a bird or a fish.

So if I can do it, you can too . . .


 



Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Judging a Cover by Its Book

This just received from Ryan Christiansen at New Rivers Press: the cover art for my novel, sized for e-book sales at the unusual (to my eye) proportions of 1562 X 2500 pixels.




Seeing what was once a daydream made digitally concrete made me wonder how I should describe, in casual conversation, what the book is really about. When I was writing it, I used to say it was about a woman's search for sperm. That summary still holds, more or less, although it's not immediately apparent from this image.

Of course, many of us don't use the cover to choose what we read. The two books on the top of my pile at the moment are Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star and A. St. J. MacDonald's Circumventing the Mahseer and Other Sporting Fish in India and Burma.

Originally published in 1977, The Hour of the Star was translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser in 2011. The book is very short and very fine. Some of the sentences are so odd that they defy memorization. Others, like this one, have a sort of fractured indelibility:


Because she needed to find herself and suffering a little is a way of finding.

MacDonald's book was first published in 1948 and contains many of the worst notions of empire-builders and so-called sportsmen, with no distinction made between catching and killing and little sense of either limit or proportion. Page 81 includes this advice:


There is no better way of meeting the local people than to talk to them in their own homes about sport and their crops. Play the gramophone to them, dress their sores, give the children a few sweets, and keep both ears open for local ideas. The primitive people, such as one usually meets on a fishing trip, are largely dependent on their wits for fish and flesh, and have experience handed down to them for generations. Exploit and adapt their suggestions and ideas, and with your own knowledge you can very soon arrive at a killing method.

Until today, I had never really wondered how readers discovered such books (other than by lucky chance), or how they might find mine. Another reason to be grateful for publishers . . .