Good news for Jonathan Ames, books in Canada and more
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Good news for author Jonathan Ames: His novel, ‘The Extra Man,’ is heading toward the silver screen. It’ll star Paul Dano as the young man who apprentices with Kevin Kline, a widow escort. Katie Holmes and John C. Reilly will also star. And, we hope, Cloris Leachman as a widow.
Lately there’s been as much bad news from publishing as just about every other industry, but our brothers to the north have found a bright spot. Canadian book sales in the last quarter of 2008 were up 6% over the same period the previous year. Revenues were also up, but only 2% -- which means profit margins are getting smaller, or that Canadian book buyers were bargain shopping.
Last week a new book review launched, and we missed it! Please forgive the oversight and welcome the n+1 book review. Its honorable goal -- ‘bringing you more ambitious criticism on a wide range of subjects, including the best and most interesting books from independent and academic presses’ -- is not yet met. In this issue, there is one book from a university press, one from an independent (Chronicle Books) and four from major publishers. The subjects may be wide-ranging -- from the Christianity of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’ to Playboy and the new Hugh Hefner bio -- but those books have been widely reviewed elsewhere. Will No. 2 stretch a bit more? We’ll have to wait until March -- the book review is scheduled to appear every other month.
And here’s a lovely quote from a new interview with a contemporary author:
To try to connect with what might formerly have been called the soul, and what I might now describe as some interior locus of privacy and reflection where moments of personal significance are experienced: this, I think, is the job of the fiction writer. ... Identity is precisely not what consumer culture says it is. It’s not the playlist on your iPod. It’s not your personal preference in denim washes. The moment you become an individual is the moment when all that consumer stuff falls away and you’re left with the narrativity of your own life. All the things that would become impossible politically, emotionally, culturally, psychologically if people ever were to become simply the sum of their consumer choices: this is, indirectly, what the novel is trying to preserve and fight in favor of.
Who said it? The answer after the jump.
The quote is from the first half of an interview with Jonathan Franzen up at the 4th Estate website, which could easily be mistaken for something called the 5th estate (it’s their 25th anniversary, which both explains it and doesn’t). In the interview, Franzen talks about the idea of the social novel; the second half of the interview is due online Thursday.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo, left: Paul Dano. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times. Photo, right: Katie Holmes. Credit: Getty Images.
