The phenomenal media and marketing plans are now beginning for THE TOOLS by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels which goes on sale May 29th. It is a rare occasion that the buzz already has everyone talking about and trying to get this book. The book comes out at a time when everyone, regardless of age seems to be looking for “the Tools” to help them realize solutions to their personal circumstances.
PYM is a McNallitzer finalist. This matters.
(And better than being a Pulitzer finalist, all of whom will go down in history as co-losers.)
A year ago, nearly to the day, I saw a quote from Lorrie Moore about the prevalence of memoirs that made me nod my head in agreement. I clicked through to the full piece, a review in the New York Review of Books of three memoirs. I noticed right away that while two of the books were written by established authors and had gotten wide coverage, the third, a book called Dear Marcus by Jerry McGill, had been self-published. The author, I learned, had been shot in the back by an unknown assailant when he was 13; in an instant, he went from being a precocious young athlete and aspiring dancer to a paraplegic. Dear Marcus was McGill’s story, written in the form of a letter to the unknown man who shot him. Despite the tragic nature of the story, Lorrie Moore described a book that was engaging, cheerful, and inspiring. “There is sorrow and fury, but this is not the Book of Job,” she wrote. Dear Marcus, she said, was “short, sweet, homespun, and inspiring in the very way that he is skeptical of.”
Intrigued, I bought a PDF of Dear Marcus, which I tore through. This book needs to reach a wider audience, I kept thinking as I read. It was a story that I wanted to share with others, one that I felt merited an editorial advocate, a beautiful package, and a broad readership. It was the frankest portrayal of living with a disability that I’d ever read, a provocative look at the culture of violence that, despite his family’s best efforts, had permeated McGill’s childhood on the Lower East Side in the 80s, and a chilling story of a young boy who had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it was also funny and skillfully crafted and astonishingly candid; McGill had a natural voice that made the book feel like an intimate conversation. To me, more than anything else, it was a book about the moments in life that we can’t prepare for but that present us with an opportunity to find strengths that we wouldn’t otherwise have known we possessed.
The next day at work, I went into stalker mode. I had to find the man who had self-published this perfect gem of a book—and I had to get to him before any other editor did. I started making semi-desperate phone calls, including to a YMCA that the author had once spoken at and to McGill’s former employers. Finally, I reached someone at Mobility International USA, an organization for whom McGill had written several blog posts, who knew Jerry and offered to pass along my information to him. A few hours later, I received a phone call from the delightful and eloquent Jerry McGill, who, thankfully, wasn’t turned off by my rambling effusiveness or by the fact that I’d just called everyone in Oregon who might have ever known him. Less than a week later Jerry had and agent and we made a deal.
I’m so thrilled to be publishing Dear Marcus this week. It’s not just a book that has inspired me and made me think about the world differently—it’s also my first acquisition.
“While we are making our complaints to HBO—and it is wholly right that we do—we should take a moment to survey other fields, and other stories. With some regularity, black writers are now producing high quality fiction which reflects the texture and depth of our experience. If you can’t find yourself on HBO, perhaps you can in Mat Johnson, Danielle Evans, ZZ Packer or Victor LaValle. We fight for that ideal world where we represent across genres. But even as we expand our territory, we really should support the gains we’ve made.
“Call me old fashion, but I believe in a beautiful black world unpremised on the random whims of rich white people. We exist—whether HBO adapts our stories or not.”
“Girls Through the Veil” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/girls-through-the-veil/256154/#disqus_thread
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
Continue reading at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opinion/why-trees-matter.html?ref=opinion
[Illustration by DD Dowden]
—Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, “TNC, Trayvon, and Juan”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2012/04/tnc-martin-and-juan.html#ixzz1r0EWhkkJ
When you’re field dressing an animal, a practice known less delicately as gutting, you have to split open the ribcage and reach inside and grab the heart and sever its moorings. For anyone who’s prone to pondering the meaning of things, it’s hard to do this without coming to the realization that you’re engaged in very serious business. At a time, it was impossible for humans to live without coming face to face with this kind of nastiness. Back then, there was no hiding from the fact that we have to kill to eat. Nowadays, however, we’ve devised all sorts of clever mechanisms that enable us to hide from, or at least avoid, this reality. I’m thinking of grocery stores, restaurants, that sort of thing. But perhaps the strangest manifestation of our increasing lack of stomach has to be catch-and-release fishing.
Just to be clear, catch-and-release fishing amounts to poking a hole into a fish’s face and exhausting it, then letting it go because you don’t want to hurt it. When I say the practice is strange, I’m saying that its initial invention must have been the result of some freakish anomaly. Like if you rolled back human history to the very beginning and let our species have another go at it, catch and release is one of those things that we would probably not invent all over again. We’d definitely rediscover such things as dancing, hunting, the benefits of shelter, transoceanic shipping, drug abuse, restaurants, and maybe even on-line dating. But catch-and-release would almost certainly join the ranks of high heel shoes and wearing your pants down around your hips so that you’ve got to walk funny in order to keep them from falling down.
Our books are Jeopardy answers (questions, I know, I know).
Contestants, step your reading game up!
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/91889/orange-is-the-new-black-by-piper-kerman
“Critics who simply read in terms of authenticity do two quite damaging things: first, they…limit the ‘freedom’ of black authorship; second, they ignore or downplay the African American trickster tradition…The critic’s emphasis on white authentication seems at once to privilege and perpetuate the master’s idea that black authors depended on white folks for their authority…”
— Kevin Young, The Grey Album
or
“The same people that tried to blackball me forgot about two things: my black balls.”
—Kanye West, “Gorgeous”
