Over the holidays, the Crows took some time away from the fire of agenting to read things other than manuscripts and contracts. (I know, I know—who knew there was anything else? But it turns out the world of print is far bigger than just our little grimy corner of the bookstore. Will the wonders never cease!?) Some of us lost ourselves in the fat new Stephen King novel; others laughed their asses off over a Bill Bryson book (a helluva way to lose weight); still others turned for inspiration to that magazine of national record In Style to see just what it is we should be reading.
What books can the stars not put down?
There is the usual highbrow name checking going on—though I don't know whether to give Rashida Jones and Jennifer Garner props for moving beyond the current bestseller list, or a raised eyebrow: maybe this book has just been sitting there on the nightstand gathering dust for the past few years. But the true wonder of this list is what Tyra Banks is reading: The Facttracker, a terrific middle-grade novel from Harper Collins. Is this perfect for her reading level? (She is, after all, the woman who needed to coin the term "SMIZE" because saying "Smile with your eyes" again and again proved too taxing.) Does she even know it's for ten-year-olds? Did she think it was all about "facts"? Has she figured out yet that it's fiction? Whatever the case, for choosing a children's book, we here at Upstart Crow Literary salute Tyra Banks, America's Next Top Reader.
Over the holidays, the Crows took some time away from the fire of agenting to read things other than manuscripts and contracts. (I know, I know—who knew there was anything else? But it turns out the world of print is far bigger than just our little grimy corner of the bookstore. Will the wonders never cease!?) Some of us lost ourselves in the fat new Stephen King novel; others laughed their asses off over a Bill Bryson book (a helluva way to lose weight); still others turned for inspiration to that magazine of national record In Style to see just what it is we should be reading.
What books can the stars not put down?
There is the usual highbrow name checking going on—though I don't know whether to give Rashida Jones and Jennifer Garner props for moving beyond the current bestseller list, or a raised eyebrow: maybe this book has just been sitting there on the nightstand gathering dust for the past few years. But the true wonder of this list is what Tyra Banks is reading: The Facttracker, a terrific middle-grade novel from Harper Collins. Is this perfect for her reading level? (She is, after all, the woman who needed to coin the term "SMIZE" because saying "Smile with your eyes" again and again proved too taxing.) Does she even know it's for ten-year-olds? Did she think it was all about "facts"? Has she figured out yet that it's fiction? Whatever the case, for choosing a children's book, we here at Upstart Crow Literary salute Tyra Banks, America's Next Top Reader.
As news of J.D. Salinger's death spread across the internet today, I couldn't help but feel deeply saddened. Yes, he hasn't published new work in 45 years. Yes, his reclusive ways may have overshadowed his literary talent. But goddam could the man write.Say what you want of him: Many call him overrated or think his books are too dated to hold up to today's standards, and accounts of Salinger the man paint him as everything from ornery to completely nuts, but there's no arguing his brief time spent in the limelight of American publishing had a great impact on books and writers for years. Some even claim that The Catcher in the Rye paved the way for what would become Young Adult literature. I think that's probably stretching it a bit, but there's no doubt the novel has influenced the lives of countless teenagers.Like me.Like so many before me, I first read The Catcher in the Rye as a high school student. I was one of those annoying kids who looked forward to much of the required reading. I remember really enjoying Catcher, but not significantly more than other classics at the time. It wasn't until I got a little older and read Salinger's collections that I was able to appreciate how truly great a writer he really was.In the years since first reading him, I've often returned to his stories. Like Holden visiting the museum in Central Park, each trip back to Salinger's works finds me different. I'm no longer constantly on the hunt for phonies (at least, not quite as much). I no longer think being a part of the Glass family would have been the coolest thing in the world. But no matter what truths I'm able to pull from each reading, Salinger's skill with the language and fantastic voice remain as strong to me as ever, and are the types of writing I long to find in projects I work on as a literary agent. As an example, here's one of my favorite sentences I've ever read. It comes from Buddy Glass's description of his brother in Seymour: An Introduction. Buddy says:
My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides—smiling ear to ear as he did it—as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.
Labyrinthine? Sure. Too many commas? Maybe. But that's my kind of sentence, a sentence that says so much about two characters, Seymour in the actual description and Buddy in the cadence and style, in such a short amount of words.That's mostly enough from me. For extra Catcher in the Rye-related reading, I recommend two distinctly different takes. The first is Frank Portman's YA novel King Dork. The title character (aka Tom Henderson) hates Catcher with a passion, so much so that he's convinced there's a conspiracy among high school English teachers to pull kids into the "Catcher Cult." Tom can't get away from the book, however, after he discovers cryptic messages written in the margins of his dead father's tattered copy.For a more positive reaction to the novel, I recommend Bret Lott's essay "The Most Fragile Book," originally published in The Writer's Collection and later included in his collection Before We Get Started. In the essay, Lott talks about first reading TCITR in Creative Writing 101 as a community college student, and taking new meaning from the story at different points during his life. Nice, touching piece, especially for Salinger fans.While I'm truly sad to see Salinger go, I hope his death will lead to the publication of some of the work he's written over the last nearly 50 years and help repair his mostly tarnished image. A few more hours spent with the remarkable Glass family would make 45 years of seclusion worth it for me.In the end, 91 years ain't so bad. For the rest of us, let's listen to the advice Zooey Glass (pretending to be his Buddy) gives to his sister Franny: "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world."Take it easy, Jerome David. I hope in death you get your own honorable goddam skull like Yorrick's.
In 1974, one of the great editors in the history of children's books, Susan Hirschman, launched Greenwillow Books. She had left Macmillan (a long-ago and vastly different company from the one that exists now) for reasons of principle, and was asked by William H. Morrow (a long-ago and vastly different company from the one that exists now) to create a new children's line.
The name of the imprint came from a picture book by Elizabeth Coatsworth (called Under the Green Willow); the logo was inspired by the book and created by art director Ava Weiss; and the inaugural list, in 1975, included many of the giant talents Hirschman had published elsewhere—Ezra Jack Keats, Anita Lobel, Tana Hoban, and others—making Greenwillow's debut one of the richest and most fully-formed the industry has seen before or since. (I am cribbing freely from the masterful Minders of Make-Believe by Leonard S. Marcus, which, if you care at all about the history of children's books, you should go out and read. Seriously, it's worth the ducats.)And the publishing program hasn't slacked off since that first list.Greenwillow's author roster reads like a Who's Who of notable children's books creators since the seventies: Kevin Henkes, Lynne Rae Perkins, Paul Fleischman, Anita Lobel, Peter Sîs, Aliki, Douglas Florian, Chris Crutcher, Diana Wynne Jones, Jack Prelutsky, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Stevenson, Arnold Lobel, Paul Zelinsky, and on and on. There are so many beloved books, by so many adored creators, that it is hard to believe that Greenwillow is only thirty-five years old.Morrow was later purchased and absorbed by Harper Collins, who, recognizing a perfect thing when they saw it, kept Greenwillow Books as a very nearly autonomous imprint within the company. These days, Virginia Duncan runs the imprint, with a half-dozen brilliant people on her team, and they maintain Hirschman's dedication to publishing tomorrow's classics.To celebrate the anniversary, the group has created an anniversary blog with tons of fascinating and informative guest posts. Well worth bookmarking to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just what goes into many of the very best books in the business.
So at long last, the Apple iPad has been announced and demo'd, and you can find a photostream of the presentation at Engadet. Is it a game changer? Or did Jobs—as Michael Grant writes below—punt the reader? I disagree, but then, that's my nature—contrarian. Especially where Grant is concerned.
The iPad will probably kill the Kindle, but I don't think it really laid a glove on Amazon. The book reader interface is a steal from some other guy and not in any way revolutionary.And judging by the pricing used on their mock-up, Apple has fallen into a trap with the legacy publishers. Also, there's no enhancing capability. And since the iPad takes all iPhone apps it means Amazon can sell Kindle books to the iPad as of day one.Kind of looks like Steve Jobs punted on e-books, at least in terms of retailing and publishing.But what do you all think?
So at long last, the Apple iPad has been announced and demo'd, and you can find a photostream of the presentation at Engadet. Is it a game changer? Or did Jobs—as Michael Grant writes below—punt the reader? I disagree, but then, that's my nature—contrarian. Especially where Grant is concerned.
The iPad will probably kill the Kindle, but I don't think it really laid a glove on Amazon. The book reader interface is a steal from some other guy and not in any way revolutionary.And judging by the pricing used on their mock-up, Apple has fallen into a trap with the legacy publishers. Also, there's no enhancing capability. And since the iPad takes all iPhone apps it means Amazon can sell Kindle books to the iPad as of day one.Kind of looks like Steve Jobs punted on e-books, at least in terms of retailing and publishing.But what do you all think?
No, I'm not talking about the indentured servitude contract Chris Richman and I agreed to when we booked passage here from the Old Country. We're still in thrall to our master and doing dishes to earn our room and board. Rather, I'm talking about a little piece of shareware called Freedom. It forcibly stops users from accessing the internet. (That little clock to the right is its desktop icon.)
If you're anything like me, then you find it hard to stop yourself from checking things throughout the day. Your four email accounts, your Twitter feed, internet messenger windows, that time-suck called Facebook, Goodreads, this blog, and a bazillion other inveigling things worm their way into your serene office and distract you from the Work That Must Be Done. Some of you have self control and practice "restraint." (What is that?)Well, bully for you. Me, I got no self control. Instead, I use Freedom. I turn it on, enter the number of minutes I want to work undisturbed, and then get down to business. The only way to turn off Freedom once it is activated is by shutting down and rebooting the computer. Kind of a drastic measure, some might say, but I don't know: I'll sign on for drastic measures if it helps me get my work done.But how do you disconnect from the welter of the outside world? How do you unplug? Or am I the only one with this ridiculous little problem?(Freedom is for Mac OSX; all of you PC people will have to go the simpler route of just turning off your WiFi and exercising some self-restraint already.)
Oh, Jeff Bezos. There was a time when I was a true believer. I bought the first generation Kindle relatively early on—March or April of '08, thereabouts. I was impressed (or flattered, anyway) by the letter from you that came with it, complimenting me on being a daring early adopter, one of the few, the proud—The ripped-off.Mind you, it did work for just over a year. Sure, the back came off all of the time, and the clumsy design meant I was always turning pages by accident (seemed like every edge of the damn thing had a page flip button). Sure, reading off of a gray screen is nowhere near as fine as reading off of a crisp page, but hey, it's a new technology! It's trailblazing of the sort that heralds a new era! It's—well, how the future looked back in 1982! Sure it's a homely little device, but who besides Steve Jobs ever said technology should be pretty and appealing?For my four hundred bucks, I got about thirteen months of use out of it before the screen froze up. Now half of the screen is one of those cutesy sleep screens, and half of the screen is functional—there are still books and manucripts there, half-legible behind the stuck the save screen. (Happily not that phony prettified image of Emily Dickinson.*)When it froze up, I shot Amazon an email. I was told that the warranty was only for twelve months and to call them to be walked through a hard reboot of the device. I dawdled on making the call, because I was launching a business and so on, and everything else in life fell by the wayside.Finally I called. Rebooting? Didn't really work. But I was informed that, despite being out of warranty, I could send in my Kindle and another hundred bucks to Amazon, and they would send me a refurbished Kindle. Which, judging from how these things work, would last about a year. Could I get a further discount on the new Kindle, which is already discounted to $260 or so? No. I could only get the old, tired, lousily designed first generation. Because that, my friends, is the reward for early adopters.So instead, I used my Kindle to support my off-kilter kitchen table and decided to wait for the Apple iSlate. Yes, it will be a backlit screen that will tax the eyes, but a person can dim that to a point where it will be less bothersome. And page flips can be done with a dragged finger. And doubtless I'll be able to edit on it. And I can't help but think that there will be many, many, many options for downloading books that will allow me to avoid Amazon's proprietary e-book system entirely. And customer service at Apple is a wonder; when my first iPhone went on the fritz, the service guy there said, "Hmm, did you drop it? It looks like there's a dent here." I said, "Umm ..." And he said, "Let's just say that you told me you didn't drop it, and I'll give you another phone."And just like that, they won my business for the rest of eternity.*That digitized image of Emily Dickinson featured on the Kindle save screen? It is a bastardization of the only known photograph of ED, which is of her in a black dress with her hair pulled back. Shortly after her poems became popular after the turn of the century, she was included in an anthology, but the editor didn't like the original image—thought it was too severe. So the image was doctored to make her look more ladylike in the eyes of the editors—she was given ridiculous bangs and a fluffy white collar and dress. When the ruse was discovered, there was an outcry and the image was removed from circulation by most self-respecting publishers. Leave it to Amazon to unearth this horror and to repeat exactly the judgmental, prudish nonsense of the snobs of a century ago. Bravo, you morons!
It feels natural to follow a post about what books I really enjoyed in 2009 with a post about the sorts of books I'd love to sign in 2010. And yes, I am actively seeking new talent! In other words, GIMME GIMME GIMME.Ahem.My interests as listed on the Upstart Crow website serve as a general outline of my tastes. Yes, I like books for boys. Yes, I'm crazy for middle grade. Yes, my tastes get a little more specific when it comes to teen. No, I'm not interested in signing the next Twilight, even though I'd love to swim through piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. No, I don't currently represent picture books (please hold your rotten tomatoes until the end of the post).If you really want to send a project that will make me drool, the following list should provide some guidance. I'm seeking books that are:
So! There you have some of the things that will help separate you from the pack when it comes to submitting works to me. I hope to update the types of books I'm looking for periodically when I find something else I'm seeking. I look forward to seeing what you have!
It may surprise you to know that, despite the approximately seven hours of reading I do on an average work day, I try hard to find time to read for pleasure, too. It doesn't always work--sometimes I'm burnt out after a long day to the point of eyeball explosion--but every so often I need a break from books for children, books I might be interested in signing, or books where my red pen longs to make corrections to simple sit down and enjoy a good story.While I realize it's a little late for retrospectives now that we're nearly 5% of the way through 2010, I thought I'd compile a quick list of my favorite books for 2009. As you can imagine, I tend to read more books for children than books for adults, and the list reflects that. DISCLAIMER: These are books I happened to read during 2009, not necessarily books that were published during the calender year, and do not reflect the opinion of the entire agency.So here, in no particular order, are a few of my favorite titles read during 2009:
Finally, honorable mentions go to: M.T. Anderson's Feed, Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, Kristin Cashore's Fire, Stephen King's Under the Dome, and others I'm likely forgetting.How about you? What were some of your favorites in 2009?