We typically send out our newsletters every Monday, but we decided to send this one out early, and for this very good reason:
On June 22, Bill Clinton’s much-awaited memoir, My Life, will become available. We want to give you a heads up, as I’m sure many of you are waiting with bated breath to read what Clinton has to say regarding his “terrible moral error.” Grass Roots Books is offering My Life at 15% off cover price, but only for copies that are preordered and prepaid. So call or come in to reserve your copy at Grass Roots before June 22.
Already a top seller on the websites of retail giants due to pre-order sales, this 975-page title is destined to become the biggest book launch this year. Anticipating brisk sales, Knopf printed a whopping 1.5 million copies of My Life. Even so, some booksellers are worried that there might not be enough copies to meet the first wave of demand.
Booksellers (including Scott) were privy to some early information regarding Clinton’s memoir, as the 42nd President was the Keynote speaker at BookExpo America in early June. Clinton received a standing ovation after being introduced by Knopf’s Sonny Mehta, to which he responded, “You have to be careful treating me that way, you’ll have me believing I’m President again.”
Though Clinton was careful not to quote from his embargoed book, he did give a general overview of its contents and even quipped, “A lot of presidential memoirs are said to be dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.” After speaking for forty-five minutes, Clinton wrapped up his warmly received speech thusly: “"When I was a young man, getting out of law school, I said one of the goals I had in life was to write a great book. I have no earthly idea if it's a great book. But it's a pretty good story."
According to 60 minutes’ Dan Rather, one of the few people privileged to have read this closely guarded book, “I know it's very well-written. One of things that makes it so is Bill Clinton has tried to be, in many ways, very revealing about himself.''
From the national to the extremely local: by the time Clinton’s book launches I will be winging my way to the land of the rising sun. (My parents decided it was high time their middle-aged kids learned something of about their parents’ native culture.) So off I go, and I couldn’t be more excited.
For the next three weeks the Grass Roots Reader and myself will be taking a hiatus. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Jack and Chris will be busy sorting out the various and sundry newsletter delivery problems still plaguing us, while Scott fires off missives should special events (or hot new books or music) arise that you might like to know about. Sayonara for now!—Julie
BOOKS:
Crossing California
Stranger than Fiction
Transmission
The Moon in its Flight
Olivia Joules
Hatchet Jobs
Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me
Bush on the Couch
CROSSING CALIFORNIA
Adam Langer
"Crossing California" is serious and heartfelt; it is also laugh-out-loud funny. Langer has created a tender blend of compassion, amusement and devotion.—SF Chronicle
From the publisher:
In 1979 California Avenue, in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood, separates the upper-middle-class Jewish families from the mostly middle-class Jewish residents on the east of the divide. This by turns funny and heartbreaking first novel tells the story of three families and their teenage children living on either side of California, following their loves, heartaches, and friendships during a memorable moment of American history. Langer's captivating portraits, his uncanny and extraordinarily vivid re-creation of a not-so-past time and place, and his pitch-perfect dialogue all make Crossing California certain to evoke memories and longing in its readers-as well as laughter and anxiety. Whether viewed as an American Graffiti for the seventies, The (Jewish) Corrections, a Chicagoan Manhattan, or early Philip Roth for a later generation, Crossing California is an unforgettable, and thoroughly enjoyable, contribution to contemporary fiction.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2004/06/13/RVGA7703Q81.DTL
Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories
Chuck Palahniuk
From the publisher:
Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Included are encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big-budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drivetrain installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world (and mangled ears) of college wrestlers; the underground world of iron-pumping anabolic-steroid gobblers; the immensely upsetting circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of our most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.
Interview with Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_06_002656.php
Transmission
Hari Kunzru
From the publisher:
In a networked world, anything can change in an instant, and sometimes everything does…
Transmission, Hari Kunzru's new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.
Lonely and naïve, Arjun Mehta bides his time as a lowly assistant virus tester, pining away for his free-spirited colleague Christine. Despite building digital creatures in a feeble attempt to enhance his job security, Arjun gets laid-off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers. In an act of desperation to keep his job, he releases a mischievous but destructive virus around the globe that has major unintended consequences. As world order unravels, so does Arjun's sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that reaches Bollywood and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun's favorite Indian movie.
The Moon in its Flight
Gilbert Sorrentino
The word masterpiece applied to a book, typically means only that the literature in question has been tamed enough -- often by the author's design -- to make it appropriate for airport kiosk distribution and mass appeal. But there's another kind of masterpiece: the sort of book that stews for a long time, maybe flits in and out of print, yet gains a kind of underground momentum over the years until the times change enough to catch up with its once-radical spirit. The critics, remember, panned "Moby-Dick" back in the day. This brings us to the underappreciated American master Gilbert Sorrentino and his new story collection. "—San Francisco Chronicle
From the publisher:
Bearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans 35 years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/16/RVG9O6HKNA1.DTL&type=printable
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination
Helen Fielding
“In her delicious new novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, comic novelist Helen Fielding has moved beyond the Pride and Prejudice plotline of Bridget Jones's Diary to create a heroine who is more Austin Powers than Jane Austen.”—SF Chronicle
From the publisher:
At the close of the last millennium, Helen Fielding debuted the irrepressible (and blockbuster-bestselling) Bridget Jones. Now, Fielding gives us a sensational new heroine for a new era . . . Move over 007, a stunning, sexy-and decidedly female-new player has entered the world of international espionage. Her name is Olivia Joules (that's “J.O.U.L.E.S. the unit of kinetic energy”) and she's ready to take America by storm with charm, style, and her infamous Overactive Imagination.
How could a girl not be drawn to the alluring, powerful Pierre Ferramo-he of the hooded eyes, impeccable taste, unimaginable wealth, exotic international homes, and dubious French accent? Could Ferramo really be a major terrorist bent on the Western world's destruction, hiding behind a smokescreen of fine wines, yachts, and actresses slash models? Or is it all just a product of Olivia Joules's overactive imagination?
Join Olivia in her heart-stopping, hilarious, nerve-frazzling quest from hip hotel to eco-lodge to underwater cave, by light aircraft, speedboat, helicopter, and horse, in this witty, contemporary, and utterly unputdownable novel deluxe.
Hatchet Jobs
Dave Peck
“In his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose, his fierce devotion to stylistic and intellectual precision, and—of course—his disdain for pseudo-intellectual flatulence, Peck is Mencken's heir (although he's got to curb his lazy use of expletives). He writes that this collection marks the end of his hatchet jobs. For the sake of the republic of letters, he'd better change his mind.”—Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Online
From the publisher:
The acclaimed novelist takes a vigorous swipe at contemporary fiction and its progenitors.
"Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."رfrom Hatchet Jobs
According to Dale Peck, contemporary fiction is at an impasse. Its place as entertainer and educator has been usurped by television and the movies while publishing has become a feeder industry to Hollywood. Faced with such diminished status, novelists have reacted in two admirable, if misguided, ways: writing for targeted socio-cultural groups, they produce so-called "identity fiction," which employs a neo-Victorian realism and resembles anthropology more than art; or, they've pursued an ironic and self-reflexive postmodernism that can only comment on the real world with a mocking, impotent jest. Both "solutions" are reactionary and self-defeating, leading to books for the few rather than the many that isolate their readers instead of bringing them together.
Hatchet Jobs methodically eviscerates such writing. Reviewing the work of Jim Crace, Rick Moody, and Colson Whitehead, Dale Peck scrutinizes the publishing climate that fosters what he deems mediocre work and the critical establishment that rewards it. Essays on gay and black women's fiction acknowledge the benefits and limitations of identity fiction, while critiques of Julian Barnes and David Foster Wallace show how twentieth-century literary movements continue to shape fiction for both good and ill. Rife with textual analysis, historical context, and insights about the power of fiction, Hatchet Jobs hacks away literature's deadwood to discover the vital heart of the contemporary novel.
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
Craig Seligman
The two writers make an odd pair; one rarely mentions them in the same breath. There’s something a little crazy about throwing them together, as Craig Seligman has in his new book, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me. The gamble pays off, however, in both insight and enjoyment. Equal parts homage, biography, criticism and personal account, Sontag & Kael is refreshingly unconventional.
Although Mr. Seligman calls them opposites, the two women do share certain traits. One of the most significant is how they infuriate people and take pleasure in it. Their detractors are numerous and often vehement. A forewarning, then: Sontag & Kael isn’t likely to appeal to anyone who recoils instinctively at the title.
. . . So who is this book for? Obviously, longtime Sontag and Kael readers are at the top of the list, but anyone with a degree of familiarity with either writer should be drawn in. It’s even possible to enjoy it as a primer. Mr. Seligman is good at delivering basic information with a subtle touch. Here, for example, is one of the distinctions he draws between the two critics: "Kael is a reviewer down to her toes; her responses are specific. Sontag is an aesthetic theorist, if not always a systematic one." Elsewhere in the same vein, we get: "Kael discovered that in writing about film she could write about everything. Sontag’s ambition to write about everything seems practically unbounded."
Whatever else may be said of them, Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael are never pedantic. Neither is Craig Seligman—yet another reason why he’s such an excellent guide to their work.—The Observer
Bush on the Couch
From the Publisher
For all his simplicity and affability, George W. Bush has remained, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, "a mystery wrapped in an enigma." In Bush on the Couch, Dr. Justin A. Frank, a well-respected Washington, D.C.–based psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, unwraps that mystery, assembling a comprehensive psychological profile of President Bush. Using the principles of applied psychoanalysis -- the discipline of psychoanalyzing public and historical figures pioneered by Freud -- Frank fearlessly builds his case ... and reaches conclusions that are at once highly persuasive and deeply disturbing.
Through a close analysis of Bush's public statements and behavior, as well as the historical record provided by journalists, biographers, and those who have known the president well, Frank traces the development of Bush's character from childhood to the present day. Examining closely the role of the president's parents -- especially Barbara Bush, an acknowledged disciplinarian whose own insecurities may have prevented her from adequately nurturing her son -- Frank finds in Bush's childhood the roots of a dramatic psychic split that remains a dominant influence on his adult worldview. Frank argues that this split has inevitably hampered Bush's ability to manage his emotions, charging his psyche with restless anxiety, and conditioning him to view the world in the black-and-white terms that have so evidently shaped his administration.
Among the other subjects Frank explores:
Bush's false sense of omnipotence, instilled within him during childhood and emboldened by his deep investment in fundamentalist religion
The president's history of untreated alcohol abuse, and the questions it raises about denial, impairment, and the enabling streak in our culture
The growing anecdotal evidence that Bush may suffer from dyslexia, ADHD, and other thought disorders
His comfort living outside the law, defying international law in his presidency as boldly as he once defied DUI statutes and military reporting requirements
His love-hate relationship with his father, and how it triggered a complex and dangerous mix of feelings including yearning, rivalry, anger, and sadism
Bush's rigid and simplistic thought patterns, paranoia, and megalomania -- and how they have driven him to invent adversaries so that he can destroy them
At once a compelling portrait of George W. Bush and a damning indictment of his policies, Bush on the Couch sheds startling new light on an administration whose record of violence and cruelty seems increasingly dependent on the unstable psyche of the man at its center. Insightful and accessible, courageous and controversial, Bush on the Couch tackles the question no one seems willing to ask: Is our president psychologically fit to run the country?