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During a Dallas-area writers’ conference over the weekend, Nan Talese, the publisher of James Frey’s "A Million Little Pieces," was asked about the ordeal involving Frey’s book during one of the sessions. Talese didn’t hesitate to respond, lamenting the way that she and Frey were treated when they appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," saying the host has "fiercely bad manners." The media are buzzing with her comments: "You don’t stone someone in public," Talese also said of the way Winfrey grilled them.
You may recall that when Talese appeared with Frey on "Oprah" in January 2006, she appeared calm and even somewhat sympathetic to the host’s distress. At the time, she called the entire mess over Frey’s fabrication of events in his memoir a "very sad" affair; she also tried to explain to Winfrey and millions of TV viewers her firm belief in trust between editors and writers when it comes to the facts. Winfrey would have none of it, but Talese was guarded in the face of the talk show diva’s fury. Not anymore. You can find her comments around the Web. The gossip site Gawker finds that Talese’s continued support for Frey’s memoir is completely wrong, but she does receive points for standing up to Winfrey’s self-righteous attitude and--a silly way to end their post--for having "those great teeth."
Time magazine online suggests that Talese was well-prepared--even expecting--to make comments directed against Winfrey during the conference. At one moment, she "pointedly turned toward the C-SPAN crew that was filming the event" and the rest of us may get a chance to view her remarks on C-SPAN’s Book TV by this weekend.
Nick Owchar
Must the Brits always have the fun first?
This fall, in the United Kingdom, Vintage Classics is bringing out what they’re calling "Twins" editions, paperbacks in which two works of literature--one classic, one contemporary--are wrapped together into a single volume. At the Guardian’s book blog, Giles Foden is a bit skeptical about the whole enterprise although he does find good merits in this new line.
What sorts of pairings are we talking about? At one of Random House’s U.K. websites, you’ll find books grouped under brief explanatory labels, like "Crime" for Patricia Highsmith’s "Ripley’s Game" and Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment," "Lust" for Martin Amis’ "The Rachel Papers" and Henry Fielding’s "Tom Jones," and "Love" for George Eliot’s "Middlemarch" and A.S. Byatt’s "Possession."
Of course, it’s a marketing strategy that can lead to some bizarre matchups: I’m not sure what Dante’s "Inferno" really has in common with Philip Roth’s "Sabbath’s Theater" (they’re presented under the diffuse title "Sin"), but, heck, there it is on their list of forthcoming fall releases.
On the other hand, if this gets some people to appreciate classic works and to think of them as being in dialogue with modern novels, is that so bad? No word yet from Vintage on when the twins will appear in U.S. bookstores.
Nick Owchar
You almost never hear the name Herbert Marcuse anymore, but 40 years ago, he was a leading critic of American economic and political life, as controversial as Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. A self-professed Marxist, he escaped Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and became an American citizen in 1940. Although he taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis, it was when he went to UC San Diego in the mid-1960s that he became a counterculture superstar, inspiring many members of the New Left.
Marcuse died in 1979, at 81. But a number of his books remain in print, and now a new collection, “The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse,” edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Beacon: 250 pp., $20 paper), seeks to distill the essence of his work. It’s not easy reading, but what makes it interesting is the way that, at his best, Marcuse looks past theory to an almost utopian sense of possibility.
In his day, this got Marcuse in trouble; his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which argues that tolerance can be a negative social force by making room for (and, indeed, empowering) oppressive ideologies, was widely criticized on all sides when it appeared in 1965. And yet, there’s something undeniably compelling about such a notion, especially in a culture in which so many public debates are dominated not by the best and the brightest but by the loudest and the most uncouth. What is the nature of society? In what kind of world do we want to live? There may be no definitive answers to such questions, but one place to start, Marcuse suggests, is by thinking for yourself.
David L. Ulin
 Yesterday, in its ThursdayStyles section, the New York Times ran a piece by Anna Jane Grossman about parents who are upset about the use of misspellings and improper grammar in Barbara Park’s popular “Junie B. Jones” series for young readers. In case you’re among the uninitiated, Junie B. Jones is a first-grader with attitude, a good kid who can’t help getting in trouble on occasion and definitely has a hard time sitting still. Children love her; according to the Times, the 27 Junie B. books have more than 43 million copies in print.
And yet, this article informs us, there is now a backlash among some parents because the character, who narrates her own stories, doesn’t use grammatical English or even (necessarily) proper words. “In 2004,” Grossman writes, “Park was selected as one of the American Library Assn.’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck.”
Can we be blunt? This is ridiculous, a fundamental misapprehension about how reading and writing work. Books do not exist to teach us proper grammar but to draw us into an experience, to share with us a piece of the world. As it happens, our cover piece in this Sunday’s Book Review is about the very same issue: Chris Abani reviews the anthology “Rotten English,” which gathers 200-plus years of vernacular literature. The idea, Abani argues, is that the language, and by extension the literary canon, is in a constant state of evolution, transformed and broadened by outsider voices and forms. Mark Twain wrote in vernacular, as did William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, even Chaucer and Shakespeare. Without vernacular, in other words, we wouldn’t have an English language or a literature.
As for Junie B.? “I think she’s in kindergarten and first grade,” my 8-year-old daughter says, “and she should talk like that.” I agree. But more to the point, we ought to stop looking for reasons to take books away from kids. It’s hard enough, in a culture that offers endless flashier entertainments, to convince young readers that books are a viable outlet for their curiosity. When we find a book that resonates with our children, shouldn’t we just get out of the way?
David L. Ulin
J.K. Rowling may be taking a little breather after the release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” her seventh and final book in the wildly popular series, but she’s already started two new writing projects.
“I’m sort of writing two things at the moment,” Rowling told USA Today. “One is for children, and the other is not for children. The weird thing is that this is exactly the way I started writing ‘Harry.’ I was writing two things simultaneously for a year before ‘Harry’ took over. So one will oust the other in due course, and I’ll know that’s my next thing.”
The Scotland-based writer says that she’ll also “probably” pen an encyclopedia of all things Harry — drawing from more than a decade worth of notes to flesh out plot points and details about characters that didn’t make the final cuts.
“I suppose I have [started] because the raw material is all in my notes,” Rowling told “Today” show host Meredith Vieira and fans in an interview from Edinburgh Castle.
But don’t hold your breath.
“What’s quite uplifting is that in the middle of all this sadness I feel about ‘Harry’ ending — and I do feel a lot of sadness about it — is the thought that financially I don’t have to publish immediately,” she tells USA Today’s Carol Memmott. “So I can take my time. And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss. Heaven. No pressure.”
Kristina Lindgren
 Last week, when I posted an item about Ross Macdonald, I had no idea he was so much with us once again. Then, another new Macdonald volume arrived — “The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes” (Crippen & Landru: 352 pp., $25 paper), edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan (who is an occasional contributor to Book Review).
What Nolan has gathered are 12 stories, mostly from the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as 11 additional story fragments — the “Case Notes” of the subtitle — that, for whatever reason, Macdonald left incomplete. (Much of this material comes from the author’s papers, which are at UC Irvine.) That makes the collection something of an inside job: constructed as a detective’s notebook, complete with a “biographical sketch” by Nolan that frames Archer as a real person, born in Long Beach, marked by war and police work, defined by his times.
I love a hard-boiled short story, but what intrigues me more are all those false starts and near-misses, the glimpses of Macdonald at work. Too often, we think of writing as inevitable, unyielding as stone. Yet, every author starts with a blank page (or a blank screen) and no real idea how to fill it in. Here, then, Nolan offers us the clues to such a process, evidence of Macdonald’s writing life laid bare.
David L. Ulin
Comic-Con International is undeniably one of the biggest comics events of the year. On the streets of San Diego this week, you’ll see impressive-looking banners depicting the mask of Iron Man, whom Robert Downey Jr. portrays in a forthcoming movie. Although you’ll find plenty of coverage at The Times' blog for the convention, here at Jacket Copy one can’t help but report another interesting item about the ways that comic books--like traditional books of prose--are getting pushed and prodded into new technological formats. Sean Demory and Steven Sanders, creators of the comic book adventure "Thunder Road," are releasing their story, which presents a bleak alternative history of the modern world, in an unexpected way: completely, exclusively, on cellphones.
"A lot of people just kind of want to fix the current [print comic book] industry," Sanders says in a recent interview. But while many are trying to "just get more readers to go along with the current system" of comic books in print, he and Demory are hoping to attract fresher audiences by giving them a riveting story that they can enjoy on the go.
To read the story, cellphone users must press the right-left arrows on their phones to scroll through images from the story, which GoComics.com says is now available on all major carriers, including Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.
Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel "The Road," the story looks at the fanatical, desperate state of the world--and its survivors--after 50 years of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Nick Owchar
At 11:15 p.m., bookstore owner Doug Dutton, dressed in a hooded monk’s robe of rough brown fabric tied with a rope, welcomed guests to the “longest running Harry Potter publication party west of the Mississippi.” The store had actually thrown a party for the second book, although this wasn’t a midnight extravaganza — that started with book number three. The difference this year was the level of anticipation. The party officially started at 11, but by 9, a crowd was gathering in the courtyard.
The countdown clock was running: 39 minutes to midnight.
A little later, Dutton appeared again, to lay out rules for the evening:
1. The use of exploding money is strictly prohibited.
2. No apparating to the front of the line.
3. No sliding down the banisters. Sliding up the banisters was okay.
Manning a divination booth in the courtyard were a pair of 16-year-old girls who have formed a Harry
Potter club at their school and consider themselves experts on HP trivia. They were challenging all
comers, and it was amazing how many really young kids could come up with details from all six books.
By 11:45, there were hundreds of people in the courtyard, and the line for pre-paid copies snaked around the planters, under the stairs and out to the parking lot. The countdown was thunderous, and the press at the tables where books were being exchanged for vouchers was staggering.
Bookstore employees dashed back and forth from the back room, wheeling dollies loaded with boxes marked “Harry Potter: Do Not Open Until July 21.”
You knew people were happy because, despite the hideous traffic jam getting out of Dutton’s parking lot, there were no incidents of road rage.
On the way home, one of our kids opened the book right away and started reading; in the other car, the audio book wrapper was unceremoniously shredded and a disk stuffed into the dashboard in an effort to hear as much of the story before sleep took over. Parking, we encountered several families dragging home with humongous books under their arms.
We all smiled sleepily at each other and turned in.
Sonja Bolle and Liz Dubelman
Pegasus Books has scored a coup that it hopes will put the year-old publishing house on the map. On Sept. 12, it will release Alexandre Dumas' lost novel, "The Last Cavalier," a lavish swashbuckler in the tradition of his greatest works.
"If we get the proper media attention, I think it can be a big success," Pegasus publisher Claiborne Hancock told Publishers Weekly.
The manuscript, the third in Dumas père' trilogy on the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, was unearthed in the archives of Paris' National Library by noted Dumas scholar Claude Schopp, who completed the book’s final chapter based on years of research. First published in 2005 as "Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine," the novel spent 12 weeks on bestseller lists in France, where it sold 250,000 copies.
It's the story of Hector de Sainte-Hermine, the last in a line of French aristocrats who is released from prison in 1804 to serve as an enlisted man in Napoleon’s army, bent on revenge for the death of his family. "An Aramis as powerful as Porthos, a D'Artagnan wise as Athos," Le Monde wrote of the chevalier.
It's the second treat this year for Dumas fans, who have a sexy new translation of "The Three Musketeers" from Viking to devour.
Kristina Lindgren
For us, the Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore Harry Potter party is a family affair. We’re here with Liz’s husband Paul and nine-year-old daughter Grace, as well as Sonja’s mother and nine-year-old son Luke.
We’ve read every Harry Potter book several times, beginning when our kids were five. For Luke and Grace, Harry has been an almost continuous family experience: He has made up a good deal of bed-time reading, occupied a large portion of travel time (listening to the extraordinary Jim Dale read), and offered an incentive to learn to read themselves.
The kids feel very prepared for tonight, having gone through all the books again over the past few months — all 3,341 pages. Don't think they can’t quote the number. And yes, they’re in costume: Grace as a Mundunga Fletcher, heretofore unknown niece of Mundungus — her robes open to reveal an assortment of aids to pranksters — and Luke as Albus Dumbledore, withered hand and all. Dutton’s has planned a “stump-the-experts” trivia booth, manned by local teenagers; the kids are dying to give it a try … but they’ve been rejecting question after question, saying, “Oh, they’ll know that!”
We began the evening watching J. K. Rowling online as she read the first chapter at midnight in Britain. She read flawlessly for 20 minutes. The kids fled, shrieking that they didn’t want to hear it. They wanted to read it for themselves.
The Dutton's cafe is serving butter beer, pumpkin juice, fire whiskey, cauldron cake, Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans, Cockroach Clusters, Licorice Toads. And it’s all free!
Muggles, wizards and mudbloods are lining up to exchange their pre-paid receipts for vouchers that will get them books at the witching hour, even as dozens more are paying now. We have to say, the butter beer tastes like what they probably drink in Hogsmeade, but the fire whiskey seems to be Red Hot candies soaked in something sweet, maybe ginger ale.
Sonja Bolle and Liz Dubelman
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