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"I think the funnest part of running a bookstore is treasure hunting...going through those boxes and coming up with hidden treasures," says Jeffrey Frase, owner of Cameron's Books, the second-oldest used-book store in Portland, Oregon. "It's just like being a kid again." Directors Jin Ryu and Yi-Fan Lu spent two months getting to know Frase before asking if they could film this five-minute documentary.
Editors, designers, and other members of the Penguin team talk about their favorite fonts in this promotional video for Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield, published this month by Penguin imprint Gotham Books. Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Helvetica, Garamond? What does your favorite font say about you?
Next week Simon & Schuster will publish Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean, the long-time staff writer at the New Yorker and author of seven books, including Saturday Night and The Orchid Thief. In her new book Orlean chronicles the life of the dog that was born on a battlefield in France in 1918 and became a movie star and international icon.
In November OR Books will publish Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward, a frequent contributor to the magazine who wrote "The Art of Reading Nathanael West: Simple Was His Pilgrimage and Brief" for the May/June 2007 issue. This is a clip from John Schlesinger's 1975 film adaptation of West's novel The Day of the Locust, starring Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, and Geraldine Page.
With work on their minds this Labor Day weekend (when many of us are taking three days off), the fine folks at Open Road Media take a look at how several writers, including Andres Dubus and Don Winslow, paid the bills while they were struggling to make it in the literary world.
Christopher Fritton of the Western New York Book Arts Center demonstrates the process of creating part of a book for the artist Richard Tuttle.
Earlier this month Random House published the paperback edition of Let's Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell's memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story (The Dial Press, 1996), who died of lung cancer at age forty-two in 2002.
Now available in the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, Booktrack provides a soundtrack for e-books, including songs, ambient music, and sound effects, that is automatically paced to an individual's reading speed.
Mary Johnson, a former nun in Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, talks about her new memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life (Spiegel & Grau). Watch the video then read Eryn Loeb's article about Johnson in the current issue of the magazine.
Since 2007, P&W has supported literary events in Houston, Texas. Literal, Latin American Voices, an award-winning bilingual magazine, was among the first Houston organizations supported by P&W. We asked its founder and director, Rose Mary Salum, author of the short story collection Spaces in Between, to share her experience as a presenter of Latin American literature and art.
What was your most successful literary program?
One of the most successful programs we hosted this year was Poetics of Displacement: Latin American Émigré Writers and the Creative Imagination. When Gisela Heffes invited us to collaborate with Rice University on this series, we immediately agreed. The response was amazing, especially to Sergio Ramírez, who I introduced! People approached me to express their absolute satisfaction.
What makes your programs unique?
We invite established authors from Latin America, who are perhaps not as well-known in the United States. Everyone is familiar with the boom authors—the García Marquezs and Vargas Llosas. Besides these magnificent authors, there is a vast array of writers who are innovative and at the vanguard of literature. We have always questioned the practice of promoting writers familiar to our audiences to minimize the risk of failure. Ultimately, the quality of work is what must win in the end. Having a magazine with these characteristics (bilingual with Latin American subject matter, but still international) puts us in the peculiar place of voicing a de-centered point of view that steers away from the dominant culture, and we want to keep going this way. The United States is becoming more and more aware of the vast repository of literature that exists “down there.”
How do you find and invite readers?
I carefully choose dates and venues to make it easy for people to visit. There’s a huge niche for Latin American writers and readers in the United States, but we are scattered. Houston is a gateway at the perfect geographical point of connection between a continent with two languages. The mission of Literal is to exploit this location and get these cultures closer to each other.
Has literary presenting informed your writing life?
Every time I research new authors and read their books, their work has such an impact on me that some of my guests become characters in my fiction.
What is the value of literary programs in your community?
We cannot ignore the globalized world where influences roam freely. A program about literature is all about exchanging ideas, perspectives, and culture. Having said that, the programs we organize are always centered on the idea of being a platform for dialog, even if we are not familiar with other cultures within our own borders. “There is a tendency to abstract and aestheticize the colossal displacement of peoples and their cultures generated by globalization,” explains Lorraina Pinnell. A publication like Literal has a special role in addressing, in concrete terms and forms, cross-cultural contacts whirling through Canada, the United States, and Latin America. For our part, we are dedicated to resisting this tendency to abstract an entire reality; the publication and, moreover, the events we organize present distinct regions of the Americas in their various and sometimes clashing embodiments.
Photo: P&W-supported writer Sergio Ramírez with Gisela Heffes of Rice University. Credit: Enrique Vazquez.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
