A must, sir...

From this week's Entertainment Weekly "Must List:"

“P.G. Wodehouse: Ask Jeeves to procure Overlook Press' handsome set of hardbound yarns from this peerless Brit wit and unrivaled master of the comedy of manors.”

--John Mark

R. Scott Bakker debuts at #2

Congratulations to R. Scott Bakker, whose THE THOUSANDFOLD THOUGHT debuts at #2 on Locus Magazine's bestseller list, right below The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia.

You can read more on his website, or other posts from Overlook's blog here, here and here.

--John Mark

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

Today is Overlook publisher Peter Mayer's birthday... I'm not sure if it's appropriate to say which one, but let's just say Overlook has been around exactly half as long as Peter has.
Cake? Check.
Champagne? Check.
Birthday Boy? Check.

We confiscated the elephant's cigarette. For this is a smoke-free workplace.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

We saved two bottles of "The Tuesday Champagne" for the party.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

The process of putting the candles on the cake took weeks of round the clock shifts! Great work, everyone!

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

An uncanny likeness of the birthday boy.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

The barbecue begins.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

The cake goes quasar.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

Peter extolls us with one of his fascinating stories of bookselling lore as our offices burn to the ground.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

Ele-yum.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

We'll be sending these to the arson lab.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

The card was confounding but delightful.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

ICE CREAM: A HISTORY! Due out this Summer from Overlook Press!

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

Don't tell Leise! A celebratory Pall Mall!

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

There's some cake left over, if you want a slice.

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

"...and then, Salman Rushdie says to the penguin..."

Peter Mayer's _0th Birthday

We all signed the card. Only one of us spilled champagne all over it. It wasn't me.

For the Plum dumb...

I spied this on Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. blog, but the latest Guardian UK author guide is on P.G. Wodehouse. It's a nice introduction to the author and includes links to several other Wodehousian articles from the Guardian that ran in the last few years at the bottom. More on Wodehouse from our blog can be found here.

--John Mark

Sneak Preview: The New York Times raves about Charles McCarry's THE LAST SUPPER

Is Charles McCarry the world's great literary espionage master? Jacob Heilbrunn graciously throws Charles' hat in the ring in his gracious and smart appreciation of McCarry's career in the 4/2/06 New York Times Book Review. Highlights follow.

"The cold war novel has fallen on hard times. Once the stuff of high drama and derring-do, the genre has pretty much evaporated along with the conflict that spawned it. Even the high priest of the form, John le Carre, moved on to new terrain, bashing multi-national corporations in THE CONSTANT GARDENER. But once an era ends, it becomes ripe for reassessment. Was le Carre really #1--or is another espionage master lurking in the shadows who might be deserving of the palm?

It is thus with more than a pinch of curiosity that one reaches for Charles McCarry's thriller THE LAST SUPPER, which first appeared in 1983 and has now been reissued by the Overlook Press. McCarry has written numerous novels, including the popular TEARS OF AUTUMN but he has never been a household name. A former American intelligence officer who did tours of duty in Europe, Africa and Asia, he mines his experiences in THE LAST SUPPER.

Written in spare, biting prose, it traverses much of the past century, from Weimar Germany to Burma during World War II, from Vietnam in the 1950s to Mao Zedong's China. Thrown in for good measure is a hefty dose of Yale's Skull and Bones, European aristocrats, gentlemen's clubs, sexual liaisons, third world assassins and other mandatory appurtenances of the cold war novel. All of this might sink to parody in the hands of a middling novelist, but McCarry is the genuine article. This is a blazingly good read that is almost impossible to put down.


So where does McCarry's nearly faultless performance leave him in the cold war novelistic pantheon? He easily best his America rivals, but whether he topples his British contemporaries from their perch is another matter. Le Carre, for example, depicts the remorseless grind of the life of a spy not as an end into itself, but to draw broader lessons about loyalty and betrayal. Still, McCarry never succumbs to a bogus moral equivalence in which Western operatives are as nefarious as their Communist counterparts. He instructs us that the real problem is not so much moral quicksand as incompetent scheming. At a moment when the C.I.A.'s trevails are evoking nostalgia for a golden age when it supposedly operated effectively, McCarry offers a useful reminder that such an era never existed. That alone is reason enough to welcome the return of his excellent Paul Christopher novels.”

Be sure to read the entire review in this weekend's book review.--Jim

Poem of the Week: Anna Akhmatova's "Love"

While you read the big biography, you might as well keep a copy of Overlook's Anna Akhmatova's Selected Poems handy. Spring is springing on Spring Streets everywhere, and love is in the air like smog. Cough cough. Enjoy "Love" by this terrific Russian poet!--Jim










LOVE

Now by the heart, furled still
Like a snakelet, its magic brewing,
Now on the white of the sill
Whole days as a dovelet cooing,

Now a glint of the hoarfrost's glaring,
Now an edge to the stock's slow scent,
But surely and secretly bearing
Away from delight and content.

So sweetly it melts its distress
In the violin's suppliant moan,
And it frightens one when one guesses
Its lurk in a smile yet unknown.

[1911]

Running of the elephants

Check out Gothamist for their recap of the running of the elephants last night. It was cold, so cold, and the tacos were delicious. Also, given the size of your average elephant, and the fact that they've been hanging around clowns all their lives, I don't know that I'd trust an elephant with a haircut like Moe from the Three Stooges. Just sayin' is all...
--John Mark

Elephant Walk 2006 in NYC (now with horses!)

We've had a lot of people coming here looking for info on the circus elephants marching through the streets of New York tonight, so I thought I'd redirect you to Gothamist, who are experts on the matter. I wrote a little bit about it last week here, and I very seriously doubt I'll make it out tonight. The weather is just too cold. And we're making tacos at the house. I know seeing elephants for free is a once a year experience, but people, it's taco night.

--John Mark

Charles McCarry in the news...

Charles McCarry has been very much in the news lately, not only for reviews of The Last Supper, but he's also popping up in reviews of other espionage novels as well as a standard by which literary thrillers are measured. See below...

From a Forbes.com review of John Lawton's A Little White Death:
"John Lawton joins the ranks of literary-minded thriller writers such as Alan Furst and Charles McCarry."

From an Entertainment Weekly article on the television show "24":
"24 is moving into areas of political suspense that, until now, were mostly the province of novels, such as those by Charles McCarry, Ross Thomas, and — on the other side of the pond — John le Carre."

From a March 17 New York Sun piece on the top 5 Washington, DC political satires:

"#3: 'Lucky Bastard,' Charles McCarry. This former CIA agent crafted a darkly satiric tale of Jack Adams, a charming liar and compulsive womanizer with a mastery of politics. This is the Clinton years through the eyes of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with a viciously sharp sense of humor."

And finally, Otto Penzler includes McCarry in a list of espionage writers who engaged in a little spying themselves in his February 22nd column in the New York Sun:

"Among the most distinguished authors of espionage fiction of the 20th century are W. Somerset Maugham, who wrote the first realistic collection of short stories about a spy, "Ashenden" (1928); Erskine Childers, who wrote the first pure spy novel of the 20th century, "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903); John le Carre, whose "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1963) and George Smiley novels have been well-filmed and never out of print; Graham Greene, who wrote what he called "entertainments" of such high quality that they are regarded as serious literature, even by snobbish critics, notably such classics as "Orient Express" (1933), "This Gun for Hire" (1936), "The Confidential Agent" (1939), "The Ministry of Fear" (1943), and "The Third Man" (1950); and Charles McCarry, America's greatest espionage writer, the author of such masterpieces as "The Tears of Autumn" (1975) and "The Secret Lovers" (1977).

But did you know that every one of these authors was also a spy? Maugham worked in Russia and Switzerland between the world wars; Childers was a British hero in the Boer War and World War I who later moved to Ireland and was shot as a traitor by an Irish Free State firing squad; Mr. le Carre had a desk job with MI5, at which he met fellow spy novelist John Bingham; Greene, employed by MI6, became friends with the British traitor and Soviet spy Kim Philby, and is reputed to have aided the Soviets with some spying himself, as well as protecting Philby; and Mr. McCarry was a field worker for the CIA for more than a decade."

--John Mark

your heart on your sleeve and your books on your head

...aaaaaaannnnd welcome to Monday morning! When I got into work this morning one of these pictures was on Yahoo's "most viewed photos" right between the 5-legged lamb and the polar bear cubs. Enjoy...

--John Mark

Per Olov Enquist in Entertainment Weekly

The Book About Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist got an A- in Entertainment Weekly this week. Read on...

Acclaimed Swedish novelist Enquist clearly relishes blurring, erasing, and redrawing historical figures with his poetic brand of fact-based fiction. While sketching the intense friendship between two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and late-19th-century hysteria patient Blanche Wittman, he celebrates the tension between fact and artistic license. At one point, Blanch observes, "I learned not to regard factual events aas metaphorical. Something is what is. Nothing else." Yet Enquist constantly contradicts this statement in this exhilaratingly brisk text (translated by Tiina Nunnally), crafting a sublime allegory that correlates his heroines' grievous romantic afflictions ("[H]e who touches Marie touches death"_ with radiation (Curie's medical break-through, which was a cause of both ladies' demise). Much like his fascinating subjects, Enquist cannot crack the heart's mysterious scientific code, but his novel still throbs with a vigorous pulse. A-

Happy St. Patrick's Day

We just had a little St. Patrick's Day feast, lovingly cooked up by Tracy, Elyse, and Jeff on the electric grill. So just like the Irish immigrants in the old days, we have now returned to our desks bloated and sleepy and full of hot dogs, burgers and chips. For a while it put me in a Memorial Day state of mind, but then I remembered that it's freezing outside, the pools aren't open, and we have to come back to work on Monday. At any rate, it was nice to take a break, kick back, and listen to the soothing sounds of editor Alex Young on the bagpipes. That's right...we had a bagpipe serenade. He's a regular Rufus Harley.

Pictures and captions below courtesy of Jim:

Did you know the cheeseburger was invented in Ireland by St. Patrick in 1973?

Squash and weiners on the grill of the great Irish patriot George Foreman. Yum.

We imported these authentic sour cream and onion chips from O' Duane Reade. The hot dog buns we found under a magical rainbow.
We went all out and hired the world's greatest bagpiper Dieter von Houseonfire! I can't believe he knew all those vintage Rush tunes!

I can't even begin to tell you all the ways that this picture is awesome. Well done, Jim. At first I thought it was that part from the Cremaster movies where all the editors are marching down that one creepy hallway...

If you're looking for something Irish and literary this weekend in NYC, Gerard Donovan, author of the forthcoming Julius Winsome (due in the fall from Overlook) will be reading the greatest hits of Irish lit with Colum McCann and others at Puck Fair from 12:30-3:00pm. Follow the link for more info.

If your hangover gently suggests that you stay inside for the remainder of the weekend, Diarmaid Ferriter's mammoth history of modern Ireland, The Transformation of Ireland will keep you busy all weekend long...

--John Mark

NYC Elephant Walk 2006

Next Tuesday, March 21st is New York City's annual march of the elephants from Queens into Manhattan and over to Madison Square Garden--actually, it's Monday night just after midnight, so technically Tuesday. It's also the namesake of our blog, kind of... Other competing theories include the Lawrence Welk song "Baby Elephant Walk," or a Cambodian restaurant in the suburbs of Boston.

I've never gone to watch one of these things. For some reason Monday, midnight and midtown just don't sound like my cup of tea. Add to that freezing temperatures and crowded sidewalks with equal parts cranky children, pushy parents, and animal rights activists, and, well, you get the picture. And what about the possibility of a rampage?

--John Mark

Poem of the Week: Edith Sitwell's "Mariner Man"

We continue to tease the release of Edith Sitwell's Collected Poems (due out from Overlook in June)! Today's poem "The Mariner Man" is probably not about Ichiro, Seattle's great slap-hitter (although Safeco Field does have "trains" behind their right field fence, hmm). The hitter is no geezer, he's still in his prime and still capable of batting in the high .300s. But we can dream of the intersection of poetry and baseball and think of Ichiro's steady gaze at the gap in search of yet another bloop single. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Enjoy the poem and go Ichiro!--Jim

Mariner Man

' What are you staring at, mariner man,
wrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea ? '
' Those trains will run over their tails, if they can,
snorting and sporting like porpoises ! Flee
The burly, the whirlygig wheels of the train,
As round as the world and as large again,
Running half the way over to Babylon, down
Through the fields of clover to gay Troy town --
A-puffing their smoke as grey as the curl
On my forehead as wrinkled as sands of the sea ! --
But what can that matter to you, my girl ?
(And what can that matter to me?)

LEGENDS nominated for L.A. Times Book Prizes

Robert Littell's book LEGENDS: A Novel of Dissimulation has made the shortlist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the mystery/thriller category. Here is a selection of quotes from reviewers on the book, beginning of course with the LA Times:

"Though LEGENDS is an entertainment, it offers us unexpected literary pleasures, including a description of the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862 that rivals the one in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[LEGENDS]…does not scant, expertly roaming the continents and offering a psychological puzzle to go with all the deception and violence…"
—John Updike in The New Yorker

“Now and then novels come along of such originality and power that they blow me away…[Littell] has outdone himself with this dizzying, dazzling portrait of a spy who has so many identities—legends, in spook talk—that he no longer knows who he is…If there was any doubt before, this novel makes it blazingly clear that Littell’s is one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today, period.”
—The Washington Post

“Happily for those of us who love the intricacy, deceit, subtlety, complexity, and worldliness that the best espionage fiction embraces, Mr. Littell has produced a new thriller…LEGENDS solidifies Mr. Littell’s position among the pantheon of great espionage writers.”
—Otto Penzler, The New York Sun

--John Mark

March is National Small Press Month

Better late than never, but I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Small Press Month. Overlook is somewhere in the middle...on the bigger side of small presses, but on the MUCH smaller side of the big houses. With only 25 employees, we put out a large list that rivals some of the big corporate houses, but we'll side with the small guys, thank you very much.

--John Mark

Poem of the Week: Edith Sitwell's "Came the Great Popinjay"

More from the forthcoming Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell. Enjoy! Hooray for poetry!--Jim












Came the Great Popinjay

Came the great Popinjay
Smelling his nosegay :
In cages like grots
The birds sang gavottes.
' Heordiade's flea
Was named sweet Amada,
She danced like a lady
From here to Uganda.
Oh, what a dance was there !
Long-haired, the candle
Salome-like tossed her hair
To a dance tune by Handel.' . . .
Dance they still ? Then came
Courtier Death,
Blew out the candle flame
With civet breath.

"It is a remarkable apparatus," said the officer...

I heard a piece this morning on the BBC World Service about Margaret Atwood unveiling her LongPen, which is an invention that allows Atwood to sign books for fans anywhere in the world by a remote control robot arm (that honestly looks kind of Erector Set in the picture). She can also chat with them via a video link. Pretty cool stuff.

My first thought when I heard "two metal arms holding a pen reproduce the signature" was the device in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." My next thought was a piece by the artist Tim Hawkinson that I saw at the Whitney last year called "Signature Chair," which is a turntable with a track where the record groove would be that guides the pen along the paper. According to Artnet.com, it's for sale, which probably would have saved Atwood a ton in research and development... I dunno, take a look at all three, let me know what you think.

Atwood's LongPen:

Kafka's "Penal Colony" device:

Hawkinson's "Signature Chair:"


--John Mark

Sudoku Masters

Janelle from our Woodstock office sent me a link about the Sudoku World Championships getting underway in Rome next week. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t look like the USA has a team, which is too bad, because I could have really used an Italian vacation instead of another week of freezing winds and stepping off curbs into gutters full of black slush.
There’s always next year…

--John Mark

This Dame Collected

Office copies of Edith Sitwell's Collected Poems showed up today! Hot Dame!

Long out of print in the United States, Overlook Press is bringing this overlooked poet back to bookshelves across our great land this June!

Look how excited she is! Here's a sneak peak poem! Catch Sitwell Fever!--Jim

Switchback

By the blue wooden sea,
Curling capriciously,
Coral and amber grots
(Cherries and apricots),
Ribbons of noisy heat
Binding them head and feet,
Horses as fat as plums
Snort as each bumpkin comes :
Giggles like towers of glass
(Pink and blue spirals) pass ;
Oh, how the Vacancy
Laughed at them rushing by !
‘ Turn again, flesh and brain,
Only yourselves again !
How far above the Ape,
Differing in each shape,
You with your regular,
Meaningless circles are !’