Solid Ground - On Sale, April 24th!

Photo: Kyle Sheridan
Cover Design: Natasha Snow

Holy crap, I'm almost published! On Monday, April 24th, my book Solid Ground will be released by NineStar Press.

I've shared the cover photo and a few details about the book on Goodreads, but many of you have asked for more information. Well, alright...

About the Novel
Solid Ground is the story of Conor McLeish, a middle-aged guy with a kind heart and an unfortunate Jameson habit, who simply wants to be a better man. He has a steady job, a Buddhist boyfriend, and a published debut novel, but he's weighed down by a secret and a truckload of emotional baggage he's carried from his youth.

As his fortieth birthday nears, Conor wants nothing more than to move ahead, to stop sabotaging his life and finally gain his footing. Life's not perfect though, and neither is Conor. He is his own worst enemy, and he continues to stumble over his hard-earned dysfunction.

Much of the novel is set in central Florida, where both literal and metaphorical alligators roam the riverbanks. Solid Ground is an intimate human story, a tale of personal evolution, that a wide audience can connect with and enjoy. The book is both dark and humorous, similar in tone to the works of Jonathan Tropper or John Irving.

Solid Ground is a work of literary fiction, and if I've done it right (and I think I have), it will feel like real life – full of smiles, dreams, tears, laughs, regrets, loss, dysfunction, love, and maybe, a bottle or two of decent whiskey.

There you go. Now, if you want more details, you'll have to buy the book and read it for yourself!

Coming Soon
Next week, I'll share links to Amazon, B&N, and other online retailers where you can pre-order/ buy the book in eBook format for $6.99 or in paperback for $14.99 (it's not published in hardcover).
For those who are interested, I'm also standardizing a process for getting signed copies!

Turn Style: Best Book Jackets of 2012

Posted By: Jeff McKown

Flavorwire.com has polled a group of book jacket designers and published their picks for "best" book covers of 2012. My picks for best and worst from their list are below. I'd love to hear which ones you like or don't like, and any great book jackets from last year you think were left off the list.

Click here to see all the jackets the experts selected (but don't, of course, judge the books by their covers).

My favorite from the list: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
(concept flames, symmetry, color, three-dimensional)

And my least favorite from the list: NW by Zadie Smith
(surely more refined artistic eyes see something special, I see two letters)

As a bonus, here is one of my all-time favorite book jackets. The book is My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a poignant chronicle of the horrors of the war in Bosnia published in 1999 with stunning prose by British journalist and self-proclaimed war junkie Anthony Loyd.

Who Are the 15 Best Paid Authors?

Listed below are the top earning authors of 2011 according to an article recently published in Forbes magazine.

James Patterson:  $94 million
Stephen King:  $39 million

Young Stephen King

Janet Evanovich:  $33 million
John Grisham:  $26 million
Jeff Kinney:  $25 million
Bill O’Reilly:  $24 million
Nora Roberts:  $23 million
Danielle Steel:  $23 million
Suzanne Collins:  $20 million
Dean Koontz:  $19 million
J.K. Rowling:  $17 million
George R.R. Martin:  $15 million
Stephenie Meyer:  $14 million
Ken Follett:  $14 million
Rick Riordan:  $13 million

Flavorwire notes several interesting trends and stats about the list.

• Thriller and Young Adult (YA) writers dominate the list (9 of 15).
• Among the top fifteen, there are 9 men and 6 women.
• Everyone on the list is white.
• 10 of the top 15 are at least fifty years old.
• 14 of the authors write fiction (Bill O'Reilly writes "non-fiction" although he lives in a fantasy world).

Having thoroughly reviewed the works of the top-paid authors, I'll be scrapping my current novel to begin work on a story about a quirky teenage detective-spy who lives in a fantastic medieval land, wherein he uses his dragon to solve heinous international murder mysteries each day, before becoming a were-pire (trademark pending) and drinking the blood of adolescent British witches at night.

George R.R. Martin - Please Write Like the Wind

Fans of Game Of Thrones (the HBO series or the books) will love this, as will anyone who has ever impatiently waited for the next installment of their favorite book / movie / TV show.

The song is clever and the harmony is surprisingly pleasant, but the lyrics alone are worth the listen.

Five Defining Details of Maurice Sendak's Life

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012
Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/NY Times

Favorite children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died today at the age of 83.

Prior to his passing, I knew what most people know about Sendak - that he authored the children's classic, Where The Wild Things Are, and that he was a legendary curmudgeon.

Media outlets offered abundant coverage of Sendak's life and death today, and NPR re-ran a series of interviews Sendak did over the last twenty years with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. I had the incredibly good fortune of hearing those interviews, and I've linked the highlights here for you.

Sendak, the author/illustrator of numerous children's titles, fathered no kids himself, and never wished he had. 

He also hated bookstore events, because as parents shoved their unknowing children forward to his signing table, his presence as a stranger sometimes frightened the kids. 

Sendak presented himself as a tough growly man, who didn't gladly suffer fools, or people in general given the choice, but underneath his abrasive exterior, he sheltered a scarred but tender heart. 

That's some of what I learned today about Maurice Sendak. Here are five other salient details of the author's life that surprised me.

"The Sisters Brothers" Wins Tourney of Books

By Paul Gagne, Guest Blogger

The 2012 Tournament of Books concluded yesterday with a championship matchup between Teju Cole’s debut novel Open City and Patrick deWitt’s work The Sisters Brothers. It was a dream matchup – for me at least, as I had read both books – and in the end, deWitt’s modern western novel outgunned all other competitors. 

As I wrote in my initial review of Open City, surprisingly little happens in the novel. Still, its thoughtfulness and quiet power will stay with me more than any other book in the tournament. That The Sisters Brothers, a western set in 1850s northern California, prevailed in the opinion of ten out of sixteen judges, owes to three things chiefly – Eli, the winning main character in Sisters, the amount of sheer incident in Sisters versus the lack of same in Open City, and a worry that Teju Cole is aping the style of W.G. Sebald, whose work I have not read (though Austerlitz has been on my to-be-read radar for quite some time).

The Sisters Brothers is a fine diversion, featuring short-short-short chapters (sixty in total in under 400 pages) that are ideally suited for modern attention spans, while Open City introduces us to a novelist whose debut work demonstrates, at least in part, what it means to have consciousness, and ultimately, to be human.

I’m sorry, but this matchup is a no contest for me in favor of Open City. Unfortunately, a majority of the judges didn’t agree.

As for this year’s Tournament of Books, it introduced me to several books I wouldn’t have read otherwise, including both titles in the championship match. And heck, it got me to read 6 books in 6 weeks (giving a big boost to my goodreads.com challenge goal!), which I haven’t done since I commuted via the subway back in my Boston days.

Speaking of goodreads, add me as a “friend” on the site, and perhaps we can keep each other informed about great things to read, as well as get ready for next year’s Tournament of Books. 

How Books Are Born

This short clip is a very cool look at how a book is physically "born." You know - the old-fashioned way - before they were just sent as PDF files somewhere and then converted to a file your iPad can read.

I really liked seeing a stack of actual hardback book covers on a table, before they get glued around the pages.

   

Bracketology for Readers - Tourney of Books

Click the chart to to view an enlarged version.

By Paul Gagne, Guest Blogger

Have you filled out your bracket yet? Not that bracket. This one.

The folks over at The Morning News have been running the Tournament of Books concurrently with NCAA March Madness for eight years now, and it has helped to sustain a higher level of book discussion on the web.

In the Tournament, sixteen books are seeded from 1-4, with perceived powerhouse authors such as Haruki Murakami and Booker Prize-winner Julian Barnes receiving #1 seeds. Judges are assigned to each pair of books, with the winning book moving on to the next round, and so on until the final, which is decided by the opinions of all the judges, plus a tiebreaker.

If your favorite title gets eliminated before we reach the final four, don’t give up hope. There is also a Zombie round, in which a book knocked out in an early round comes back from the dead.

NPR explains the rules of the Tournament nicely, although if you think about the process of choosing the "best" book, what really makes one better than the other? This is not a heart-stopping contest decided by a buzzer-beater, and there won’t be any clutch fourth quarter free throw opportunities. There aren’t even points, after all. Judges bring biases to the table, and at least once, have admitted to not finishing both books they were assigned to evaluate. But like great basketball teams, books can have heart, they can finish strong, and on any given day, an underdog book can make a name for itself and inspire us all.

Life Advice From Louis C.K. That Might Make You Sorry You Asked

A new book of not-so-helpful advice from famous people is being published by the folks at The Believer magazine. This exciting new work, entitled Care To Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?, contains a wealth of personal guidance from a group of stable well-rounded celebrity-types like Amy Sedaris, Zach Galifianakis, Weird Al, and Bob Saget. What could possibly go wrong?

You can find some hilarious (and curse-filled) samples from the book here. I thought I would share one of my favorites from comedian Louis C.K.

Dear Louis: Is secondhand smoke really as bad as everyone says it is?
             - Rebekkeh T.
               San Francisco, CA

Dear Rebekkeh: Very good question. Let me give you some statistics.



1. Your name is stupid.
2. Nobody cares what you think.
3. I hate you.
4. I have a pretty nice penis. It’s not huge, but it’s well sized and it’s nice. This isn’t directed at you. It’s directed at any attractive woman reading this book who might run into me later in her life. I’d rather advertise my penis than answer your stupid question. Idiot.
   
           - Louis

20 Private Libraries With Dreamlike Design

What would you do if you suddenly had millions of dollars to spend?

What would you buy? What would you build?

I'd like to think I'd do great things for the many non-profit organizations I believe in and the charities I support (and I would) ...

...but I'm pretty sure I'd also do something like this.

This picture shows the library at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, CA. Click here to see photos of other beautiful and unique personal libraries.

Former booksellers - remember this question as you click through the pics. Karl Lagerfeld, how do you keep that mess alphabetized?