If I had to choose between reading and breathing, I would...*gasp*
I am a twenty-ish Christian living and working as an editor/writer in Texas. This is my first time using any technology more advanced than a microwave, so I'm sure much (unintentional) hilarity will ensue. I hope you enjoy the blog!
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From the Associated Press:
King of horror shows a softer side with new novel
by Brigitte Dusseau
Fri Nov 10, 2:28 AM ET
American novelist Stephen King is not just a horror specialist. If his new book "Lisey's Story" is anything to go by, he also knows a thing or two about love.
The 59-year-old -- famous for works including "The Shining", "Salem's Lot", "Misery", "It" and "Carrie" -- is one of the world's most successful authors yet has not been to London for 10 years.
But he swung by the British capital this week to promote his new novel, which was largely inspired by his wife Tabitha and which he described as "very special to my heart".
In the book, the heroine is the wife of a famous writer who after 25 years of marriage, begins sorting through his office when he dies, becoming wrapped up in his dark and secret universe.
King, dressed simply in jeans and a pullover and with an intense look behind his round spectacles, denies the novel is autobiographical, highlighting the differences between Lisey and his own wife.
"I am not Scott and she is not Lisey," he said. Lisey has no children while he and Tabitha have three; Lisey never went to university unlike Tabitha, who also has a "very rich cultural and mental life" and is not living in his shadow.
Yet he admits that Scott's office resembles his, adding that if Tabitha, whom he also married 25 years ago, had asked him not to publish the book because it was too personal, he would have respected her wishes.
"For me, any kind of emotional fiction always proceeds from the same place -- my own head and my own heart from my own experience," he said.
As for the label "King of Horror", Stephen King prefers the moniker "doctor of the emotions".
"I am assaulting people, mugging them emotionally. My job is make you forget you had a date, my job is to make you burn dinner.
"If you read one of my books and turn off the light and you're afraid there is something under the bed, it's good. I win."
But he's just as happy to make the reader laugh. And with "Lisey's Story", a 500-page doorstop of a novel, one of the aims was to make people sad, he added.
That said, those who love horror and fantasy can rest easy: the new novel also has its dark and terrifying side.
"It wouldn't be a Stephen King novel if it was only about love and sweet things," he said.
In 2002 King, who was still recuperating from a serious accident in 1999 and threatened by a degenerative eye condition that could have left him blind, announced he was giving up writing.
His career stretches back to 1974, when his wife fished out a manuscript of "Carrie" from the bin.
But all talk of retirement has gone. Even if he admits it is taking him longer to write, he has still publishsed two novels this year: "Cell" in January, and now "Lisey's Story", which came out at the end of October.
"It feels like in many ways the best I have ever written," he said. "Every day I sat down the story got stronger and stronger. The feelings got stronger and stronger.
"There is no way you can predict that. That's the nature of the job."
Of his wife, who has a lot in common with his novel's heroine, she is "my first critic. She reads everything that I do".
"I don't necessarily believe in marriage. But I believe in monogamy. I believe in one man and one woman. When there is love, that should be it," he went on.
"That is so hard to communicate, with anybody. We're so much alone, we're so isolated in ourselves, that getting to know another person is a lifetime job."
King refuses to say more. He's a busy man yet refuses to have a mobile telephone. "You don't own the cell phone. The cell phone owns you," he said.
All the more time, then, to add to the nearly 60 novels and short stories he's written in the last 32 years, 30 of which have been adapted for the cinema.
The books, translated into 33 languages in 35 countries, bring him on average 40 million dollars a year.
"I've written big thick books because I love to go to my imaginative world. I love to write stories. That's why I have written so many."
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.
This book news update is from Yahoo News, and it covers a new author's first book "Special Topics in Calamity Physics". This book sounds awesome, and I am definitely putting it on my to-read list. Make sure you visit the website listed after the article - it is one of the coolest book websites I have ever come across. But be warned, you can easily spend hours digging up all the cool features of the site. Oh, and if you have read the book, feel free to comment and share what you thought of it (but no spoilers!).
At 28, first-time author hits gold
By MARK KENNEDY, Associated Press WriterMon Oct 30, 12:52 PM ET
It is, apparently, very easy to hate Marisha Pessl.
She is, first of all, young and attractive, prompting one profiler to liken her to "a Botticelli angel." Then there's her writing talent, rewarded with a six-figure advance for her debut novel. Yes, she's wealthy, too.
And the novel itself? It's a best seller that The New York Times called "a whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel, delivered in an irrepressibly smart and flamboyant new voice."
Like we said, its very easy to hate Marisha Pessl.
"It sounds so cliche to say it feels like a dream, but it really does," says the 28-year-old author in the sleek TriBeCa loft she shares with her husband and two cats.
So busy with obligations now, she hardly has time to reflect. "Except for right before I go to sleep at night. I wonder what on Earth I did to deserve all of this."
That's pretty simple: Her novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," has drawn comparisons with Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. Now in its fifth printing, it has sold some 100,000 copies and debuted at No. 6 on The New York Times best-seller list, staying there for several weeks.
"My goal is to be published, and if I had even a small audience I would have been happy," she says. "I just wanted to have my little voice out there."
"Special Topics" focuses on a precocious, hyper-literate teen named Blue van Meer as she prepares for her senior year of high school in North Carolina after crisscrossing the nation with her college professor dad, a brilliant widower.
It's a lush book, studded with metaphors. A woman's perfume "hung in the air like a battered pinata." A man seems "to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken suit costume distributing coupons for a free lunch." A girl "looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last in her size."
"I'm a people watcher," Pessl says. "When I'm writing, I do see it very visually, as in a movie. Then it's simply up to me to describe it through a character."
Though the 514-page book — illustrated with more than a dozen of Pessl's own drawings — appears at first to be a humorous account of Blue's attempts to fit in with the cool kids, it soon turns into a thriller, one that ultimately tests the father-daughter bond.
"Almost as soon as I came up with those two characters, I had a vision of those final 20 pages," Pessl says. "I knew what the final outcome of their relationship would be. I knew that the arc of this novel would shift and become tainted and ultimately destroy itself."
Pessl's Blue is a font of knowledge, constantly quoting authors as diverse as Faulkner and Freud. She'll drop a reference to the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C. to describe how she anticipates fleeing confrontation, or credit the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with helping find lost people in the dark.
Sometimes, though — as in the case of the "late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer" — she simply invents both the quote and the author.
Early on in the writing, Pessl explains, she would search in vain for a specific quotation she wasn't sure existed, burning up hours on the Internet or in the library.
Her solution: Just make it up.
"Some people are so destroyed when they find that out," she says. "One particular reference book that's a favorite that doesn't exist is 'American Strange Ticks of Behavior.' Everyone wants to read that book! I want to read it, frankly."
Pessl was born near Detroit to an Austrian father and an American mother, who divorced when Marisha was 3. Growing up in Asheville, N.C., her mother would read to her aloud from the Western cannon. She graduated from Barnard College in 1998.
Writing was always a private affair, squeezed in at night while she worked by day as a financial consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Graduate school simply wasn't an option.
"When I'm writing, I don't like outside influences, I don't like opinions about it," she says. "I simply hoard my writing — for years, really. So I wouldn't work in a grad school setting."
"Special Topics" isn't technically Pessl's first novel. She wrote two others that failed, in large part because she started writing immediately after getting her ideas.
"I ultimately ended up writing myself into a hole," she says.
For her third attempt, Pessl mapped out everything, chapter by chapter, character by character — even using Excel spreadsheets. "I was really anal about it," she says.
Then came a huge risk. About halfway through the writing of the book, her then-boyfriend, Nic Caiano, was transferred to London and said he didn't want to go without her.
So she quit her job and followed, writing full time for the first time.
"I definitely felt like I was just jumping off either a diving board or a gangplank. I didn't quite know what it was yet," she says as her cats, Hitchcock and Fellini, come over for a rub. "It was a leap of faith."
It also was a leap of faith on her boyfriend's part: He hadn't been allowed to read a single word of what she had spent more than a year and a half furtively writing.
"Sometimes he would say, 'Are you sure you're not, like, Jack Nicholson going crazy?'" she says, alluding to the crazed author of "The Shining," "because I certainly sometimes felt like I was going a bit nuts."
The couple married in 2003 and the book was finished a year later. Back in New York, Pessl finally sought an outside opinion. After trolling the Internet, she sent e-mails to 10 agents of authors she admired.
"It is a first novel unlike any you will read this year," she wrote in the pitch, which now makes her wince. "It's sort of embarrassing," she says, before reconciling herself: "It's America — you got to go big."
The pitch got attention, but the novel made a bigger impact. Carole DeSanti, an editor at Viking Penguin in New York, was addicted when the manuscript was e-mailed to her, staying up late to read it off the screen.
"I just thought this was a remarkable voice," says DeSanti, who became her editor. "I think remarkable for its spontaneity and its sheer joy of writing. So many writing voices can be constricted . ...This seemed very free — free to be what it was. That was the first quality that really struck me."
An auction for the book was held and Pessl emerged with a hefty advance. To her, the money wasn't as big a deal as the acknowledgment that she had talent.
"There's been so much work that goes into calling myself a full-time writer," she says. "Probably, if you divided my advance into the number of hours that I've spent writing, it would probably be less than minimum wage."
After news of the deal, the book community wanted to learn more about this new literary star. A quick Google unearthed a glossy head shot from her college days, when she dabbled in acting. It would also adorn the book's back cover flap, confirming her comeliness.
"You have to laugh," she says. "I don't want my picture to be associated with the book. When you're creating something as an author, you're quite serious and to be minimized in that way is unfortunate."
Though critics have been almost universal in praise, some have groused that the book is too long and that the second-half thriller seems to come from nowhere.
"My book is meticulous," she says. "It does slow your reading down a bit. You have to slow down to absorb. I wanted to do that to readers. Maybe some people don't like that. And that's OK, too.
"I take a John Updikian view, I think: keep creating, keep putting it out there. So you're savaged by critics? Big whoop, you move on. You write the story that you're passionate about at the time."
Pessl is working on her next book, of which she remains characteristically mum. She also, to her delight, has been getting invitations to writers' conferences, finally meeting other authors.
"But I am anxious for that quiet time again so I can write."
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On the Net:
Welcome to my new blog - BookGirl! This blog has been stewing in the back of my brain for a while, but I haven't had the time to put it together. I don't, of course, have the time now either, but I am pressing on regardless. This blog is going to be a random collection of book reviews and book news. I have always wanted to throw my hat into the book reviewing ring and write the kind of reviews I wish I had seen before I plopped down $30 at Barnes and Noble. I don't have as much time to read during the school year (*sob*), so I won't be posting too often. I will, however, try to keep you updated on what new and crazy things are going on in the book world. Okay, so enough with the small talk. To give you an idea of the kind of books I just can't live without, I'm posting my top 10 favorite books of all time. Until next time!
1. The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
2. The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
3. Master-at-Arms by Rafael Sabatini
4. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
5. Vertical Run by Joseph Garber
6. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
7. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
8. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
9. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
10. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
