Strange but true?
This sounds like something from The Onion, but I just read this on Reuters. Is this for real?
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June 30, 2006
QPB Associate Editor Justin Ravitz Reviews Wassup Rockers for The New Press
Hey,
Justin's my right-hand man over here at QPB. Check out this very cool review he did for the movie Wassup Rockers.
http://nypress.com/19/25/film/justinravitz.cfm
Gary
One of the best songs ever recorded
A colleague of mine agrees with me that Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley is one of the best songs ever recorded. Wow. What can I say about this song except that Jeff was a prophet with one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. This song is so intense. He didn’t write it, Leonard Cohen did, but the joy and anger and melancholy and the love and the regret all come together to create one of the most ethereal songs I've even heard. The album it's on, Grace, Buckely's only full studio album, can be a hard one to get into at first, but once you get hooked there's no going back. It’s all about dying and water and drowning and eternal life and God and suffering and being remembered. How did he know that when he was thirty that he was going to go out for a swim with friends and be pulled out to sea by the undertow and drown?
Ron Barrett's work to appear in the July 2nd issue of The New York Times
Hey Folks,
We work with some incredibly talented people at QPB. Great writers, great designers, great editors great business people and here's a shout out to our web team who keeps annoying me about posting blogs, you're great too. Anyway, I'm always learning from them and am always inspired by them as well. Just wanted to let you know that one of the designers, Ron Barrett, who wrote The Nutty News and helps create the catalog you receive every month, is going to have a piece he wrote and drew appear in the Travel Section of The New York Times on July 2nd. It's called Utopiair, a parody of an emergency instruction card. Be sure to check it out.
Gary
Wayne Dyer to Honor James Frey's Book Contracts
Hey Folks,
I attended the Wayne Dyer lecture at Jacob Javitz last month. It was an interesting evening. I'd only seen Dyer on PBS--never in person--and was a bit startled when he came out on stage and he looked sleepy and quiet. Wasn't this the motivational speaker who wows audience's with his stories about faith and destiny? But after a few minutes he started to rev up and seemed, with each word, to gain more and more energy. Fifteen minutes into his talk the man came alive and he was articulate and funny and full of spirit. I was very impressed and a bit surprised to hear that he had become close to James Frey. Yes, the James Frey who was flogged on a TV show not too long ago. Seems that Dyer is going to honor Frey's contract for the two novels he was going to write. The publisher had dropped Frey like a hot turnip not long after the scandal broke earlier this year.
What does that mean, "honor his contract"? I'm not sure, but it seems to me that we will see a James Frey novel sometime in the future in some capacity. I'll be looking forward to it. Yes, I know he lied in his book, but the man can tell a damn good story.
See ya.
Gary
In Theatres Today! The Devil Wears Prada
How many of you read The Devil Wears Prada when it first hit shelves in 2003? To tell you the truth, 
I just thought it was another chick lit book, which is not usually what I typically read (literary fiction, history/politics, memoirs mostly). I didn't think it would be my "cup of tea", so to speak. Well, shame on me, because this book is absolutely hilarious and a real pleasure to read -- not just a guilty pleasure! And I fully intend to see the movie this weekend.
We've got an interview with author Lauren Weisberger up on QPB.com, where she dishes on her inspiration for the "boss from hell" theme, the fashion industry, and more!
Here's a short excerpt to get you psyched for the film release today:
"And-re-ah," she called from her starkly furnished, deliberately cold office. "Where are the car and the puppy?"
I leaped out of my seat and ran as fast as was possible on plush carpeting while wearing five-inch heels and stood before her desk. "I left the car with the garage attendant and Madelaine with your doorman, Miranda," I said, proud to have completed both tasks without killing the car, the dog, or myself.
"And why would you do something like that?" she snarled, looking up from her copy of Women's Wear Daily for the first time since I'd walked in. "I specifically requested that you bring both of them to the office, since the girls will be here momentarily and we need to leave."
"Oh, well, actually, I thought you said that you wanted them to--"
"Enough. The details of your incompetence interest me very little. Go get the car and the puppy and bring them here. I'm expecting we'll be all ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Understood?"
June 29, 2006
Reading Group Pick: The Tulip and the Pope
This week's QPB Reading Group Pick is The Tulip and the Pope by Deborah Larsen. Some of you may remember her novel The White, the tale of white girl captured by Native Americans in the 19th century, which QPB offered a few years back. Here Larsen has broken away from fiction and written a memoir of her own experience as a Catholic nun. It's a stunning, eye-opening look into a struggle between commitment and faith.
Take a look inside with this excerpt from the book:
I loved God. Maybe I could have spoken to my neighbors in the language of the parts of scripture I loved best. In this way, it wouldn’t have sounded just like me. For I was bashful. I didn’t want to sound like myself—who was I, anyway?—or like some sentimental dope.
What other language did I have, really, besides the one that had been handed to me by the Church and the scriptures? The only ideas I had about God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—would have come from tradition, from authority. It was important in those days that the words be sanctioned so I didn’t end up sounding bizarre or, worse, heretical, like the Arians, the Gnostics, or those southern French Albigensians who had been exterminated, according to the dictionary, during the Inquisition. The language of Holy Scripture, which I took to be the language of God and of the Roman Catholic Church—for the Church in a sense owned the whole Bible, I thought—was thrilling.
So if I had thought of it, I could have taken the Bible—for we had not memorized long passages in those days—and read from it to my neighbors. It would have been just like Readers’ Theatre, in which I had participated in high school.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.
I would continue reading aloud about how God created a light, which He called Day, and a darkness, which He called Night; about how the firmament came from His Hands and the creeping creatures and the great whales. The winged fowls and seeds that grew into herbs and trees would come next. And then man and woman, and the river that divided into the four heads of Phison, Gehon, Tigris, and Euphrates. I would read the part about how God brought the beasts and the fowls to Adam “to see what he would name them.”
Since God wanted “to see” what Adam would name them, I would eventually decide that God was quite a curious Person. Such curiosity on His part endeared Him to me, as did His allowing mere humans to name the things of this world.
How could you not adore the Person who had done all this? He made everything. He must have been something. Why does something exist and not nothing? Easy. Someone was kind enough to create it. He dreamt things up: you would never have thought of seeds, for instance. What you couldn’t do with seeds down through the ages! And herbs: he must have thought of something for healing and to flavor cooking. And Leviathan: all that baleen for straining plankton. What an imagination. Everything was absolutely original with Him, the Absolute.
You shrugged off all the cranky things God did in the Hebrew Bible—which most of us called the Old Testament in 1960—and you absolutely loved this Person, the One Whom you could just imagine moving over the waters. You wanted to live as close as you could to Him, live in His Shadow.
Why not dedicate yourself to Him as completely as you could? It was a cinch. Why didn’t millions of people do this every day, like the lemmings in the Arctic who sometimes grow so restless for something that they leave home and head downhill to wherever water is and think nothing of it.
“Because,” my mother would say. “Because if everyone entered religion”—in those days, in going into the convent or the monastery or the seminary, one “entered religion”—“eventually there would be no people.”
I took that as a joke. Or I took it to mean that she thought that the world needed marriage in order to produce little babies who would grow up to be people.
June 28, 2006
The Year of Magical Thinking
I'm about to start reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I know that it got stellar reviews from all the media honchos, but what really convinced me to read this book was a review by one of our editors, Victoria Skurnick. You've probably seen her name now and again in the QPB e-mail newsletters and in the catalogs you receive. Victoria called this book "one of the most moving and unusual books of this year" and while the subject matter is compelling in and of itself, it was really how Victoria bared her own soul in telling how much she was moved by the book that convinced me to read it.
We actually have a video of Victoria talking about the book, which you can view right here if you're intrigued by what I just wrote. If you haven't already bought the book, I hope you'll be as convinced as I was just by watching Victoria's reaction to it.
June 27, 2006
Reading in school
One of our editors mentioned this recently on another blog and I thought it would make for interesting discussion:
A study commissioned by the children’s book publisher Scholastic reports that kids start losing their enthusiasm for reading around age nine. The decline continues through their teen years. The number one reason, according to participants in the survey, is the difficulty of finding books they like. Kids whose parents are readers are somewhat better off.
Why do you think this is? Do you think our classic literature as taught in middle and high schools isn't appealing to today's youth? How can we encourage children and teens to enjoy reading more, and especially to find books that they do like?
June 16, 2006
What are you reading?
We want to know what you're currently reading! Anything you would recommend? Or is it completely awful and you want to warn everyone? Let us know!
June 07, 2006
Are you a Book Thief?
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a #1 New York Times bestseller. The award-winning author of I Am the Messenger returns with a story of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany who discovers the power of books—and risks everything to steal them. “Absorbing and searing”—The Washington Post Book World.
Is there a book you would risk stealing?
June 02, 2006
Winners of the QPB 2005 New Visions / New Voices Awards!
Congratulations to Julia Scheeres and Clare Clark for winning QPB's 2005 New Voices and New Visions Awards!
The winners each get a $5000 prize, QPB's commitment to supporting and celebrating the very best, boldest, most daring, most moving new tales and arrivals in fiction and non-fiction. To see the list of finalists and more visit our QPB Awards Store.
Julia Sheeres won the QPB New Visions Award with her stunning memoir Jesus Land. A heartbreaking and darkly humorous coming-of-age memoir that takes us from a hotbed of Midwest racism to a brutal Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Check out our exclusive Video Trailer for Jesus Land here.
