Coinciding with our Spotlight on Historical Fiction (REaD ALERT!), Robert Alexander, author of The Kitchen Boy (2003) and Rasputin’s Daughter (2006), is using a “live book club” to promote his newest novel, The Romanov Bride (2008). The Web, of course, offers authors a lot of ways to bring their work–and themselves–directly to the fans, and this strikes me as a pretty forward-thinking approach.

One humble suggestion, however: I’m not sure that a commercial for the broadcast merits its own blooper reel. (Follow the link, you’ll see what I mean.) In fact, I hope I never again see another blooper reel over the credits of anything, unless the footage features Jackie Chan falling off of something.

But Alexander’s work has been praised pretty highly by Booklist, so if his visual sensibility isn’t quite as finely tuned as his literary sensibility, I’ll cut him some slack.

On Galleycat, Emily Gould tracks a dangerous new trend (I adulterated this quote with links to Booklist reviews):

Rudolph Delson’s ‘Maynard & Jennica‘, Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Absurdistan‘ and Benjamin Kunkel’s ‘Indecision‘ all have something in common besides the frequency with which they’re spotted on NYC’s subways: These popular books all contain homages to hip-hop.

 After reading Gould’s MC battle, I can’t decide whether to shout “Free Bird!” or “Don’t quit your day job!”

Just got news of Hard Case Crime’s January 2009 title:

In an e-mail blast, publisher Charles Ardai shared a few facts about this reprint’s provenance:

…this is by far the rarest of all Block’s books. He wrote it under a pseudonym he never used before or since, it’s never been published under his real name (or this title), and he couldn’t even locate a copy of it himself for thirty years!

From the sample chapter:

The taxi, one headlight out and one fender crimped, cut through downtown Tampa and headed into Ybor City. Turner sat in the back seat with his eyes half closed. He was a tall, thin ramrod of a man who was never tense and yet never entirely relaxed. His hair was the color of damp sand, his eyes steel gray. His lips were thin and he rarely smiled. He was not smiling now.

The stub of a cigarette burned between the second and third fingers of his right hand. The fingers were yellow-brown from the thousands and thousands of cigarettes which had curled their tar-laden smoke around them. He looked at the cigarette, raised it to his lips for a final drag. The smoke was strong. He rolled down the window and flipped the butt into the street.

I seem to remember a book written by 13 authors…oh, yes: Naked Came the Manatee (1997). And, in fact, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, et al appropriated the concept from a practical joke called Naked Came the Stranger (1969). Now there’s an Internet start-up that’s hoping to turn a hoax and a lark into a business model. According to Publishers Weekly (”WEbook Launches Collaborative Book-Writing Site,” by Lynn Andriani), WEbook “is hoping to do for novel writing what American Idol did for music and what Wikipedia did for information.”

Essentially, WEbook hopes that people will come to its site to write books and then vote on which ones should be published.

Within the site, there are dozens of (mostly nonfiction) subject areas where members can start writing. Members can designate their work as "private," which allows them to keep the rights and share it only with their friends, or make it "public," which is where WEbook makes its money: if a book garners enough votes from the WEbook community, WEbook copyedits, typesets and publishes the book, giving the author and contributors a 5% royalty on sales.

Their first book, Pandora, a thriller with 17 authors (but 34 total contributors), came out last month. Is it any good? Sample chapters are available at WEbook. Sample paragraphs:

Pandora took a deep breath. "You know I love you, but I can’t be with someone I don’t trust," she exhaled. "Is there something I should know?"

Chris shook his head in disbelief. How could the woman resting in the next room, a woman he’d only met twice, know something that only five other people in the world knew? How had she divined the secret Chris had carefully guarded since he was eighteen? What the hell was her secret?

Oh look, here’s another one: Naked Came the Phoenix (2001).

According to recent polls by Harris Interactive, Americans’ favorite genre is crime fiction and their favorite book is the Bible. I’m sure Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) could make a one-liner out of that, but I’ll just posit my suspicion that not everyone who picked the Bible has read it cover to cover.

Here’s the rest of the list:

#1 - The Bible
 
#2 - Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
 
#3 - Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
#4 - Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
 
#5 - The Stand, by Stephen King
 
#6 - The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
 
#7 - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
 
#8 - Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
 
#9 - Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

#10 - Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The Harris site has breakdowns by gender, race/ethnicity, generation, political party, region, and education. Interestingly, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree on Gone with the Wind as the second-best book.

Also in the New York Times (”In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” by Matt Richtel), a report on bloggers who are dying on (or near) the job. I know the feeling: tightness in the chest, shortness of breath….

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I really don’t mean to make light of this. Fortunately, the demands of book blogging aren’t anything like those of tech bloggers. But I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling that, in this wired world, it can be hard to turn work off. So let’s all take this as a wake-up call, so we don’t end up like this guy:

"I haven’t died yet," said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. "At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen."

"This is not sustainable," he said.

And now, I’m going out for some fresh air. Just as soon as I finish blogging and updating Booklist Online.

(Thanks, Donna!)

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a real book with a fake author, but there’s no scandal involved. Last fall, as part of a storyline on All My Children, perfume magnate Kendall Hart decided to try her hand at a little novel writing. Two months later, the book, Charm!, was published on the TV show–and in real life, too. It’s sold over 100,000 copies to date. And, in a few days, you’ll be able to buy a perfume called “Charm,” too.

Amazingly, this synergistic ploy is a copycat (”The Book Is Real Enough. It’s the Author That’s Fake,” by Joanne Kaufman):

These are not the first instances of daytime drama brand extensions, according to Lynn Leahey, editorial director of Soap Opera Digest. Indeed, Kendall’s own mother, Erica Kane, who is played by Susan Lucci, produced the novel "Having it All" in 1997. It too was published in real life by Hyperion.

CBS has pulled the same stunt. In 2002, "Guiding Light" offered "Lorelei’s Guiding Light: An Intimate Diary," "which filled in the blanks of a character’s life during a period when she wasn’t with the show," said Ms. Leahey. In 2006, "As the World Turns" came out with "Oakdale Confidential," which dealt with the past of a character, Katie Peretti, who was credited on the cover as co-author.

Perhaps Ms. Peretti was a role model for Marcie Walsh, the police department receptionist on ABC’s "One Life to Live," who two years ago was credited with "The Killing Club," a best-selling mystery that was published by Hyperion. (The actual author was the soap’s head writer at the time, Michael Malone. Later, a "One Life to Live" character known as Hayes bought a copy of "The Killing Club" on an episode of the show and began bumping off members of the local populace based on methods used in the book.)

The 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. Here are the books:

Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)

History

What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford Univ.)

Biography

Eden’s Outcasts, by John Matteson (Norton)

Poetry

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Poetry

Failure, by Philip Schultz (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction

The Years of Extermination, by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins)

I started reading Paul Theroux’s new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, this morning. On page four, he quotes Pedro Almodovar:

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I had to laugh.

Fans of mystery, sf, and romance know well the second-class status that’s routinely conferred on genre fiction. The big reviews and big awards go to literary fiction; meanwhile, genre fans are checking out, buying, and reading books in numbers that even National Book Award winners dream about. Writers like Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, and even Philip Roth are helping to bridge the divide, but meanwhile, genre discrimination continues.

I just finished writing “Another Look at” Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon for Booklist’s Mystery Issue (coming May 1), and my Vintage paperback carries on its cover two of the most jaw-droppingly astonishing quotes:

“Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” –The Boston Globe

“The Maltese Falcon is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well written novel.” –The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Granted, these blurbs are almost certainly contemporary to the novel, and we have come a long way since then.

But.

But. But. But.

How can anyone, in any era, have written such things? Did other writers also master the detective novel while somehow remaining poor writers? Were other terrific detective stories somehow badly written?

Over at Book Group Buzz, Neil Hollands recently did a nice post called “Conquering Genrephobia.” Check it out.