Publisher and editor John O’Brien has died
Old friend and colleague John O’Brien, founder of Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press passed away on November 21st.
John and I had many mutual friends in literature and similar tastes and interests, and his vision of writing and books led me to learn about many writers whose work I would otherwise never have known. He was opinionated and sometimes difficult, but his dedication and commitment to discovering and presenting important books never wavered.
Here’s a good representation of his view of the work he did:
So I started the Review out of a sense of isolation, as well as a kind of outrage at the fact that books and authors were reduced only to marketplace value. And I should say that, from the start, I wanted the magazine to break down the artificial barriers that exist among countries and cultures. It was my view then and now that one can’t properly come to terms with contemporary writing without seeing it in an international context, and it’s also my view that Americans generally don’t want to know anything about the world outside the United States unless they are planning a vacation.
I interviewed John in 2016 for my Publishing Talks series of conversations with independent editors and publishers. We had a long and wide ranging conversation about the history of both his journal and his book publishing efforts.
In the description of that interview I quoted him: “I wanted the Press to define the contemporary period, or at least what I saw as what was most important in the contemporary period. Further, I wanted these books permanently protected, which is why from the start the Press has kept all of its fiction in print, regardless of sales. And as with the Review, I wanted the books to represent what was happening around the world rather than more or less being confined to the United States. Like the Review, Dalkey Archive Press was and is a hopelessly quixotic venture.”
In 2011, Dalkey Archive received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, and in 2015 John O’Brien was made a knight in the Orde des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to publishing French literature abroad. Not bad for such a “hopelessly quixotic” operation. The catalog of Dalkey is massive and is a remarkable testament to the talent, taste and energy John brought to his work and life.
The latest news is from Deep Vellum, which has acquired Dalked and RCF:
Before his passing, the Dalkey Archive’s board of directors approved an agreement to merge with Deep Vellum Publishing, a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts center based in Dallas, TX. Deep Vellum and its publisher Will Evans plan to honor John O’Brien’s legacy by keeping Dalkey Archive’s backlist in print and by signing future titles, together with the assistance of editorial consultant, Chad W. Post, of Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester.
As an editorial imprint of Deep Vellum, Dalkey Archive will remain true to O’Brien’s vision of keeping its legendary backlist in stock, continuing to publish leading literature from around the world, and working closely with readers, students, editors, writers, and translators to foster an international community for literature. Will O’Brien, John’s son and current president of Dalkey Archive’s board of directors, will join Deep Vellum’s board of directors as part of the merger.
An online memorial service to honor John O’Brien’s life and work will be held on December 9th. Keep up with Deep Vellum here.
Writer and editor Richard Marek has died.
Dick Marek was a legendary book editor and later an extremely successful writer and ghost writer. He lived in Westport, Connecticut with his second wife, the writer and therapist, Dalma Heyn.
I had the honor to interview Dick for Writerscast in 2015, in which he talked at length about what many consider to be the golden age of American trade book publishing, of which he was an integral part. And I had the great pleasure to have worked with Dick and Dalma on one of their jointly written novels, A Godsend some years ago. He was a wonderful person and a uniquely talented literary being.
Dan Woog wrote a lovely piece remembering Dick for his great Westport centric blog 06880 (the quote by Dick below comes from Dan’s piece.)
Richard started as a junior acquisitions editor at Macmillan and worked my way up to becoming President and Publisher of E.P. Dutton. He edited James Baldwin’s last five books, Robert Ludlum’s first nine books and novels by Peter Straub, Thomas Harris, including The Silence of the Lambs, and also Ben Stein, and David Morrell. Marek was a novelist himself. His 1987 Works of Genius concerns the psychological takeover of his literary agent by a great (and narcissistic) modern writer.
Richard and Dalma were fixtures in the Westport literary community. Together they wrote How to Fall in Love: A Novel, which was published last year.
“Love is more important than anything else in this world,” Marek said shortly before he died. “If you’re lucky enough to have it — and write about it — you will have a happy life.”
We will miss you, Richard.
New York Times obituary here.
Joy Harjo has been named U.S. Poet Laureate
Congratulations to Muscogee Creek Nation poet Joy Harjo who has been appointed the Poet Laureate for the United States, succeeding Tracy K. Smith. Joy is a poet, writer and musician whose work has inspired for many years. She is fearless in her work, unflinching in her approach to language and the worlds of spirits and of humans. Her many books include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human, A Map to the Next World, and the ever-gorgeous collection, She Had Some Horses. I interviewed Joy about her memoir Crazy Brave in 2016, which you can find on Writerscast here.
“It’s such an honoring for Native people in this country, when we’ve been so disappeared and disregarded,” Harjo says. “And yet we’re the root cultures, over 500-something tribes and I don’t know how many at first contact. But it’s quite an honor … I bear that honor on behalf of the people and my ancestors. So that’s really exciting for me.”
And for all of us as well….
From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings:
1. SET CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUND RULES:
Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand.
Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane.
Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill.
The land is a being who remembers everything.
You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs—
The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding.
As I brushed my hair over the hotel sink to get ready I heard:
By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.
Do not parade, pleased with yourself.
You must speak in the language of justice.
Aharon Appelfeld has passed away
The New York Times reported that the wonderful Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld passed away on January 4. I had the great pleasure to interview Appelfeld about the novel Blooms of Darkness for Writerscast in 2010. You can listen to that conversation here.
Appelfeld was the author of many books in Hebrew and at least 16 of his novels were translated into English from 1981 to 2011, the Times noted. Appelfeld’s works include Badenheim 1939 (an extraordinary and beautiful work), The Age of Wonders, To the Land of the Cattails, The Immortal Bartfuss, For Every Sin, and The Skin and the Gown. Schocken will publish The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping January 31, and To the Edge of Sorrow in January 2019.
Appelfeld was described by Philip Roth as a “displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” Critic Eva Hoffman wrote, “In his call to break the concealed silence, he has courageously begun to illuminate regions of the soul usually darkened by secrecy and sorrow.”
He was a warm and generous man whose life and work touched readers around the world. Tablet magazine published the last interview with him recently.
The great writer Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison has passed on. Not too long ago he said “at my age you don’t think about the future because you don’t have one” but that is true only in the narrowest sense. His future is assured, because his words are still with us. I don’t think Jim really saw time as finite anyway. He was too busy experiencing life and thinking about how it felt and how to express the beauty of the world and all of us in it.
His novels are beautifully written and always humane. He loved people, but understood their foibles, failures and ultimate transcendence. He loved the natural world as only a person who lived in it can do.
I’m not sure there are too many writers like him anymore. Nor will there be.
Though best known for his fiction and essays (and large appetites), Jim was first and foremost a poet: “in poetry our motives are utterly similar to those who made cave paintings or petroglyphs, so that studying your own work of the past is to ruminate over artifacts, each one a signal, a remnant of a knot of perceptions that brings back to life who and what you were at that time, the past texture of what has to be termed as your ‘soul life’.”
His latest book of poems is Dead Man’s Float, published by Copper Canyon Press, in which this poem is found.
February
Warm enough here in Patagonia AZ to read
the new Mandelstam outside in my underpants
which is to say he was never warm enough
except in summer and he was without paper to write
and his belly was mostly empty most of the time
like that Mexican girl I picked up on a mountain road
the other day who couldn’t stop weeping. She had slept
out two nights in a sweater in below-freezing weather.
She had been headed to Los Angeles but the coyote
took her money and abandoned her in the wilderness.
Her shoes were in pieces and her feet bleeding.
I took her to town and bought her food. She got a ride
to Nogales. She told us in Spanish that she just wanted
to go home and sleep in her own bed. That’s what Mandelstam
wanted with mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. Everyone
wants this. Mandelstam said, “To be alone is to be alive.”
“Lost and looked in the sky’s asylum eye.” “What of
her nights?” Maybe she was watched by some of the fifty
or so birds I have in the yard now. When they want to
they just fly away. I gave them my yard and lots of food.
They smile strange bird smiles. She couldn’t fly away.
Neither can I though I’ve tried a lot lately to migrate
to the Camargue on my own wings. When they are married,
Mandelstam and the Mexican girl, in heaven they’ll tell
long stories of the horrors of life on earth ending each session
by chanting his beautiful poems that we did not deserve.
Allan Kornblum, Coffee House Press
My good friend, long time publisher and poet Allan Kornblum passed away November 23, 2014. He was only 65, and will be missed by many. Coffee House Press, which he and Cinda Kornblum founded as the successor to the earlier and more informal Toothpaste Press, has been in Minneapolis for over 30 years now, and has become a hugely important literary organization in its local community and far beyond, with national and international reach.
Allan and I first met in the mid-seventies when we attended a range of small press bookfairs around the country, and we shared many interests, both in poetry and in book production. Toothpaste was an early participant in the tiny midwestern literary project I started in 1976 called Truck Distribution Service.
When I traveled to Iowa to sell independently published literary books to local bookstores, I would stay with Allan and Cinda in their house in West Branch (proudly known as the birthplace of Herbert Hoover). They taught me alot about the local literary community and history, and as Allan became more involved in letterpress printing, Allan beautifully produced books and ephemera for my Truck Press (and later for Jim Sitter’s Bookslinger, the successor to Truck Distribution, Allan turned out a long list of beautifully produced broadsides and small books). The list of great books published by Allan and Coffee House is pretty incredible. Visit the press’ website to learn more about what Allan and his colleagues have accomplished, and to see the vibrant work the now well-established nonprofit press is doing today. Some really excellent publishing is going on there, and has been for a long time; no better legacy for Allan could be imagined than the books this press produces.
In later years, we I did not see Allan much more than once a year at the annual booksellers’ conventions, but we kept in contact, did business together, and always shared news of each other’s work and family. I interviewed Allan for Writerscast as part of the Publishing Talks series as I think the history of independent publishing needs to be documented, and first hand accounts by those involved seem to me the best way to preserve some of the knowledge and experiences of an important era in publishing. You can listen to it here if you want to get a feel for Allan and his work.
One moment with Allan still stands out for me. Probably six or seven years ago, when Amazon was first promoting digital conversion of print books, they put on presentations to publishers and distributors to convince us to convert as many of our books as possible to digital formats. I was perhaps naively convinced aready that the reflowable ebook format would be a great boon to reading. But Allan stood up and asked the pointed question – “What happens to the carefully designed pages we create for our books in this new digital format?” The Amazon representative bluntly stated something to the effect that “designed pages don’t matter in our ebooks.” That answer did not satisfy Allan, and somewhat presciently, he told me that this lack of interest and concern for design would be a big problem for e-readers and e-reading. How right he was then, and sadly, his views then about ebook design matters are still meaningful today. As he knew so well, the interaction between the reader and the word is where the magic of reading comes alive.
Fred Seibert talking Frederator and more
As some of you may know, I am working with Frederator Studios on a digital publishing program called Frederator Books. We are experimenting in all sorts of ways, mostly doing creative new ebooks for kids of all ages. Frederator is the brainchild of long time media genius Fred Seibert. We did a video interview together in December 2013 and posted the unedited audio track to Soundclound. It’s a bit long and covers a lot of ground, but anyone interested in media and animation will find Fred’s conversation interesting and constructive. We talked about Fred’s background and experience in a long and innovative career, what Frederator is doing now and in the future, and also about what we are trying to do in digital publishing.
You can listen to the entire interview here. Sometime later in 2014, I will post an edited version of the interview at Writerscast also.
Frederator Studios and Cartoon Hangover make cartoons for television, movies and the Internet, and program the networks Channel Frederator and Cartoon Hangover.
Frederator Studios was founded by Fred Seibert in 1998. Since then the company has produced 16 series & over 200 short films including The Fairly OddParents, Fanboy & Chum Chum, and Adventure Time. Our shows are on Nickelodeon, Nick Jr, Cartoon Network, and Channel Frederator. Frederator is in producing partnership with Sony Pictures Animation and YouTube.
Cartoon Hangover is the studio’s television channel distributed on YouTube, launched in November 2012. Pendleton Ward’s Bravest Warriors (developed by Breehn Burns, Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi) was the first hit series, followed by James Kochalka’s SuperF*ckers, and the Too Cool! Cartoons.
Frederator Networks’ pioneering Internet animation channels began in 2005 with Channel Frederator, and has expanded to include The Wubbcast, ReFrederator and Cartoon Hangover.
– See more here.
Here’s the “standard” Fred biography.
Sites We Like: PennSound
PennSound is an incredible project established by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein with tremendous support from the University of Pennsylvania, collecting poetry in audio form from an incredible array of sources. There really isn’t anything like it anywhere. There are historical recordings, so many of which are fantastic and powerful, that it is almost impossible to know where to start. All the poets whose work matters to me are here. And there are many voices from the recent past and the present as well. You can spend hours on this site and of course you will never be able to experience the full range of what they have, there is just too much. And there is new work added or highlighted every day! Amazing. For anyone interested in the sound of writing, this is a site you must visit.
Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein at PennSound (photo by Mark Stehle)
PennSound Daily is written by Michael S. Hennessey.
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Self Publishing News
If you are interested in self publishing (and who isn’t these days?), there are so many options and choices, it’s not so easy to figure out what your best pathway is. And it will differ depending on what kind of writing you do, how much you have published in the past, and what your goals are as a writer.
There are all kinds of resources for writers who want to self publish, and there is something new going on almost every day that could be useful, valuable or interesting to writers (and some publishers) in the universe of self publishing.
Since so much of my work relates to publishing and options for writers, I decided to follow new developments and doings in the self publishing arena, and highlight some of those I think will be most useful to writers. You can find my Self Publishing News on Tumblr. Please take a look, and if you like what you see, you can follow my posts pretty easily. I’ll be posting 3-5 times a week, depending on my workload and what kind of interesting news I can uncover. I hope you find this little site useful. Feel free to send links and news items my way whenever you find something you think is interesting or valuable to writers.
Coming soon: a new interview series focusing on Self Publishing How To. Video and audio interviews with experts and successful writers talking about what works and what doesn’t, always practical and useful information and ideas for writers and anyone who might be self publishing their work.
Hurricane Irene delays Writerscast posting
Just like millions of other Americans we were hammered pretty hard by this hurricane, in our small Connecticut town 99% of homes lost power, and as of today, September 2, still more than 55% of homes are without power. We got ours back last night, thankfully, but still do not have internet. Without a good connection, posting interviews is painfully difficult. I have several great interviews ready to post, next being with Dean Bakopoulos about his excellent novel My American Unhappiness. I hope to have a new Publishing Talks interview posted by next week also.
Our other big news is that Livewriters, our book and author video site, had its best traffic month in August, surpassing 70,000 unique visitors. We are posting ever more interesting interviews, readings and discussions with authors about their books there, plus featuring just about every book trailer there is. And if you want to enjoy a lively literary blog experience, visit Livewires, a fresh look at the literary landscape.
During the storm, I had plenty of time to read (print books by candlelight and flashlight, ebooks with the device’s own light) and am looking forward to talking to the authors of quite a few wonderful books, including My Green Manifesto, Just Bill, Confronting Collapse, and Duet.
My best wishes to all who suffered in and after the storm, and condolences to all those who died in it.