See You at Book Expo America 2009!

BEA is here and The Overlook Press is ready, set, go. We're throwing a party tonight for the photo exhibition and book launch of Allan Tannenbaum's New York in the 7os - pics will be posted if you can't make it. On Friday through Sunday, you can meet and greet us at Booth 3552 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. Meet Rachel DeWoskin, author of Repeat After Me at our booth on Friday (5pm) and at a Saturday Autographing Session (12:30-1pm). Meet the lovely and talented Overlook Editor Juliet Grames at the Indie Buzz Editor's Panel on Saturday at 11am; and Amy Foster, author of the forthcoming When Autumn Leaves at the Downtown Stage on Saturday at 3:30pm, and at the Overlook booth at 5pm.

Rachel DeWoskin, Author of REPEAT AFTER ME, On Her Favorite Books and Authors

Rachel DeWoskin, author of the new novel Repeat After Me, is interviewed in today's Shelf Awareness "Book Brahmin" column:

On your nightstand now: Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These are all books I'm teaching right now in my memoir class at New York University, so I'm joyfully re-reading them. And Yu Hua's new novel, Brothers, is also next to the bed, first on my end-of-the-semester list.

Favorite book when you were a child: Charlotte's Web. My mom read that to me hundreds of times. I have a visceral memory of hearing it for what must have been the 200th time when I was a little kid on an overnight train across China. And although I couldn't have articulated this then, that book was America for me, was home--animals, ice cubes, fireworks, fairs. It was so familiar and comforting that it encompassed my entire country and culture. All the colors and words and feelings I knew best.

Your top five authors: Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov and Annie Proulx.

Book you've faked reading: Oooh. I pretended to have read Moby Dick for 10 years until I finally read it (which took me approximately another 10 years).

Book you are an evangelist for: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. Let me propagandize/count the ways. It is the most original book I've read. It boils over with brilliance and slays me each time I re-read it, which I do at least twice a year since I include it on every syllabus I teach, no matter what the genre, semester, student population or school. Autobiography of Red is a shimmering everything--history, love story, poem, novel, essay, biography, autobiography--it's academic, romantic, political, wildly imaginative and heart shattering. My students weep, shout, sit stunned and silent, fight, analyze, memorize, imitate and then write their best work either about or because of it--consistently.

Book you've bought for the cover: Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware. Have you seen that cover? It has as much work in it as most books manage in their 300 pages . . . not to mention that the story is epic, graphic and staggering.

Book that changed your life: Angle of Repose. Wallace Stegner's writing let me understand time.

Favorite line from a book: Probably Nabokov's "Fill up the page, Printer." (From Lolita.)

Book you most want to read again for the first time: The Brothers Karamazov. The first time I read that, I sat clutching it for hundreds of pages at a time until my eyes spiraled. I took irritating breaks to eat and sleep briefly before racing back in. Fun!

Washington Post on Wodehouse, Sex and the Mumps

Dennis Drabelle, writing in the Washington Post's excellent Short Stack blog, offers a unusual theory on P.G. Wodehouse: "Overlook Press has been publishing deluxe-ish editions of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, and the latest has just arrived: Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. I mean "latest" in two senses: This is the latest volume to come out, and it was the last novel the overlord of light comedy finished before his death in 1975. (He left a later manuscript, the aptly titled Sunset at Blandings, incomplete.) This rounding out of the Wodehousean oeuvre reminds me of a theory put forward by Robert McCrums in his excellent biography, Wodehouse: A Life: He traces the sexlessness of all the romances in the master's novels to the mumps.
Having come down with the mumps myself as a teenager, I recall being warned to be as listless as possible in the bed I was supposed to get out of only to go the bathroom. The danger, I was told, was that roughhousing might end my sex life before it had even started. McCrum suggests that in Wodehouse's case that dire possibility actually came to pass, reducing his sex drive to near-zero. This means that his marriage may have been unconsummated (he begat no children) and may explain why Bertie Wooster sneaks into and out of countless manor houses with ease but can't find his way into Madeline Basset's bed. McCrum may be right, may be wrong, but what's been on my mind lately is what would happen if Wodehouse's characters did have intercourse. The American novelist Jonathan Ames tried to answer that question a couple of years ago in his novel "Wake Up, Sir!," a Wodehouse pastiche in which there is plenty of humping. It's quite enjoyable, but it's not Wodehouse, partly because nobody can measure up to the master in depicting utter silliness in an inimitably facetious prose style. And partly because, well, the Wodehouse brand has to be genitals-free. Why that is, I'm not sure, but here's a guess: It's part of the Zeitgeist. During most of Wodehouse's long career, writers and readers had yet to reach an accord by which the former would knock down the bedroom walls and the latter would peer in."

John Crowley Interviewed in THE BELIEVER Magazine

Author John Crowley is interviewed by Ed Halter in the new issue of The Believer, on newsstands now.

"Crowley’s skill at transcending genre has had its pitfalls, too, as illustrated in the publishing saga of the Ægypt cycle, his four-volume opus that navigates through both the intricate romantic affairs of an Aquarian-age cluster of upstate New Yorkers and an occult re-reading of Western history. Though the original books were slowly released over two decades by various publishing houses—some parts marketed as fantasy novels, others more as literary fiction—a complete, definitive edition of the series was finally published between 2007 and 2009 by Overlook Press."


THE BELIEVER: Your novels exist somewhere between fantasy and science fiction and naturalistic fiction. Do you have any interest in the way the term slipstream has been circulating in the last few years to describe this kind of moving among genres? Would you ever think of yourself as a slipstream writer?


JOHN CROWLEY: I think this is something for critics to determine rather than for writers to do. I mean, I just write books. If they have names for them, the names can seem more or less convincing to me. I think the difficulty with slipstream and interstitial fiction and all those kinds of terms is that they tend to be used only by people who are in one of those sub-branches of fiction. They’re used by genre writers who are interested in adopting mainstream techniques or adopting mainstream values or getting mainstream readers to read their books. You will notice that it’s mostly genre writers who even use the word mainstream. Mainstream writers don’t use the word mainstream—they don’t know there’s a mainstream and these tributaries or whatever they are.

Summer Reading: THE GREAT AMERICAN WEEKEND BOOK

Three years ago, Overlook debuted The Weekend Book, an enchanting treasury of off-hours activities from the England of yesteryear. An enormous success, this famous publishing tradition now moves west to America, with The Great American Weekend Book. Compiled and edited by Maura Diamond, this is a delightful book for week-enders young or old, guest or host, married or single, discreet or adventurous. The Great American Weekend Book is an invaluable book for readers of all ages, containing a wealth of advice from what to eat on country jaunts and tips on bird-spotting, to suggestions for games to play and instructions for how to build a blow-gun. From odd rules of old, forgotten games to the quirky philosophies of American outdoorsmanship, The Great American Weekend Book looks back fondly at our country’s proud recreational history. Entertaining, informative, charming, elegantly presented, and sometimes just plain weird, this is a must for summer reading.

Overlook Preview: THE RUSSIAN HERITAGE COOKBOOK by Lynn Visson

Coming next month is a new edition of Lynn Visson's The Russian Heritage Cookbook - an unparalleled collection of hundreds of delicious, authentic recipes gathered from private collections -- completely revised and back in print.Based on favorite family recipes and passed down through generations, collected by the author from the private collections of the old Russian emigre community of New York City, The Russian Heritage Cookbook represents the restoration of an entire culinary heritage, which previously existed only in the memories of the cooks themselves, or in the form of yellowing scraps of paper. Most Americans have experienced only a few classic Russian dishes: Chicken Kiev, Beef Stroganoff, Borscht, and a few others. The Russian Heritage Cookbook brings together the recipes for these classic dishes, along with hundreds of recipes for the sumptuous meals that have delighted generations.

Joe Pappalardo's SUNFLOWERS: THE SECRET HISTORY Reviewed in American Gardener Magazine

Joe Pappalardo's Sunflowers is reviewed in the current issue of American Gardener: "It's not often that a single-topic horticulture book can spur much interest beyond those who love the plant. However, confessed sunflower stalker Joe Pappalardo packs much more than the botanical aspects into what he calls "the unauthorized biography of the world's most beloved weed." The author's fascination with his subject—from the flower head's logarithmic spiral (the most efficient way to pack the maximum number of seeds in an area) to bits of history such as the sunflower's role in Hitler's invasion of Russia during World War II—is reflected in his engaging prose. The reader can't help but be drawn in as Pappalardo paints a compelling picture of just how integral sunflowers are to our everyday lives. A veteran science journalist, the author applied the same research skills he's used at Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine, and Time to uncover a wealth of sunflower science and lore. His obsessive research revealed that these plants can "lay legitimate claim to participation in all sorts of historical events and the actions of all kinds of famous characters." For example, Pappalardo relates how NASA used sunflowers to prove one of Charles Darwin's theories in Spacelab during the 1960s and how Osama bin Laden used sunflowers to fund al-Qaeda. The book also brings the unsung heroes and behind-thescenes characters into the light. These include many of the Sunflower People, as he calls them, "those who have dedicated their lives to the plant." Among these are plant hunters stalking rare species, and scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture working to track down, catalog, store, and preserve more than 3,000 sunflower species. If you are a science, history, or trivia junkie, this book is for you. Add the horticultural component, and any plant lover will enjoy this "sunflower's-eye view of humanity," despite the lack of photography aside from a few grainy, black-and-white photos. Therein lies my only complaint about the book, but it did not outweigh my appreciation for Pappalardo. captivating, well-documented research and breezy, easy-to-absorb writing style." —Doreen G. Howard.

Milton Glaser Launches MiltonGlaserWorks Website

Overlook author and graphic design legend Milton Glaser has launched a brand new website, MiltonGlaserWorks.com. An e-commerce-enabled companion to the designer's online home base, MiltonGlaser.com, the new site offers signed editions of Glaser's books and other works, including posters and a new range of giclée prints of assorted musicians and William Shakespeare. . . . Glaser fans should also be on the lookout for the release of the documentary Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. Directed by Wendy Keys and featuring Overlook Publisher Peter Mayer in a supporting role, the film has been making the festival rounds and premieres on May 22 at New York's Cinema Village.

Remembering NEW YORK IN THE 70s

Here's to New York in the '70s - pictured here is Truman Capote at the bar in Studio 54.

Leonard Quart of the Berkshire Eagle recently reviewed New York in the 70s: "Photographer Allan Tannenbaum's book, New York in the '70s, evokes a world of Puerto Rican street gangs, hotels for the homeless, hookers in Times Square, and rubble-filled South Bronx lots that all existed simultaneously with the transformation of SoHo from a neighborhood of warehouses and the light manufacturing of small machine parts to one of artist lofts and the city's lively art gallery center. In fact, the city's economic decline meant there were many cheap spaces for artists to live and work in that allowed for a great deal of artistic experimentation. The book's photos by Tannenbaum, the Soho Weekly News' photo editor, emphasize that aspect of the '70s, and the sexual adventurism of its intense, burgeoning club life. The '70s also carried over some of the political protest from the '60s. There are photos of anti-Vietnam War protests, demonstrations for the rights of farm workers, and the first big Gay Pride Parade in 1975. The book also contains photos of the city's iconic figures including such disparate personages as Ed Koch and John Lennon, Roy Cohen and Andy Warhol. As one can see, decades defy neat categories. They are a combination of objective facts, and the way we perceive them." - Leonard Quart, Berkshire Eagle

More Praise for Susan Hill's THE RISK OF DARKNESS

"Fans of the new breed of British psychological mysteries, a sub-genre that has been led for years now by Elizabeth George and P.D. James, will be thrilled to know there’s a new series to add to their reading lists: Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler books. The Risk of Darkness is Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler’s third literary excursion and it is a doozy. If you’re looking for a sleepy Sunday read, this is not it. This book is a tense, surprise-packed, complex, modern mystery masterpiece. DCI Serrailler is asked to assist in the investigation of a missing 8 year-old boy, a case very similar to one he had run into a dead-end on months before. When the unlikely culprit is caught, a number of lives are affected. This main plot is interwoven with that of Serrailler’s physician sister, Cat Deerborn, and a distraught young husband under her care. Like the best modern mystery writers, Ms. Hill doesn’t tie off every loose end—as in real life, questions stay unanswered and lives are left in unresolved shreds. Unaccustomed readers may be disconcerted by this; however, if this type of tale is your cup of tea, get ready to pour, drink, and enjoy." - Michelle Kerns, Sacramento Book Review

Rachel DeWoskin On the Road for REPEAT AFTER ME

Rachel DeWoskin will launch her book tour for Repeat After Me on Thursday, May 14 at Idlewild Bookstore, 12 W. 19th Street (nr 5th) in Manhattan. Join us for the Launch Party at 7pm!

Tour Schedule

May 19th, 7:30pm, Bookslut Reading Series, HOPLEAF, 5148 N. Clark, second floor, CHICAGO.

May 20th, 6 pm, 57th STREET BOOKS, 1301 East 57th Street, CHICAGO

May 21st, 7pm, WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST, 5233 N. Clark St., CHICAGO

May 28th, 7pm, SHAMAN DRUM, Harlan Hatcher Grad Library Gallery Rm 100, ANN ARBOR

May 29th, 4pm, BEA Overlook Booth #3552, Javits Center NYC

May 30th, 12:30-1:00pm, BEA Autographing Area, Javits Center NYC

June 9th, 7 pm, BARNES & NOBLE, Boston University, BOSTON

June 16th, 2pm, BOOKS-A-MILLION, 11 Dupont Circle N.W., WASHINGTON DC

June 24th, 7pm, BARNES & NOBLE, 82nd & Broadway, NYC

Deirdre O'Connell's BALLAD OF BLIND TOM in Pop Matters

Deirdre O'Connell's biography of Blind Tom Wiggins is reviewed in Pop Matters: "This book tells the story of a figure who is all but forgotten today, but who achieved great success in his own lifetime. But Tom’s story is not simply one of talent and success; given his position as a slave, and conditions of autism and blindness, the question of exploitation must of course be explored. Responsibility for Tom was passed between the hands of many individuals, almost all of whom were hoping to profit from him. Enormous sums of money were made from his performances, and very little of this went to Tom himself. Less still was given to his family; his mother died in poverty at the age of a hundred and one. Even when Tom’s novelty began to wear off, and his actual musical ability began to be questioned, money continued to pour in, and his promoters’ urge to profit became uglier, with legal battles ensuing. . . Blind Tom is a biography of a little known personality, and delivers all that such a book should. O’Connell clearly demonstrates that Blind Tom is important not only as a musician, or as a freed slave, but as a key figure in a period of history, when questions of race and equality were being asked more openly, but were still far from resolution. His story is one of music and celebrity, but at its core it is one of humanity."

Great Gifts for Mom: THE ARTIST'S MOTHER

Nancy Davison pays tribute to The Artist's Mother on this Mother's Day weekend: "Lavishly illustrated with reproductions of paintings and drawings of their mothers by thirty-three artists, this book offers a quick overview of art history and a brief survey of women’s lives from Albrecht Dürer’s mother in 1490 to Andy Warhol’s mother in 1974 (pictured here: "Julia Warhola"). Judith Thurman, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of books about Isak Dineson and Collette, wrote the introduction “A Mother’s Gift, a Child’s Homage” dedicated to the idea that we are all mothers and that we are all artists. A combination of art history and social history, the book’s basic format is simple and effective—a brief essay about the artist and the artist’s mother on the left side, the picture of her on the right. The reproductions are crisp and uncropped. Regardless of style or medium, the artists all approached their mothers with an unsentimental, unsparing eye. Relationships between them jump off the page. The images are boldly executed in a wide variety of styles. Many of the male all-stars—Dürer, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso—are represented; they are joined by female artists such as Anguissola, Cassatt, and Kahlo, as well as artists of color—Motley and Tanner—and even some of the academic painters such as Købke and Blanche, who won fame and fortune in their time but are no longer in fashion. . . The mothers gaze at us from their canvases—wary, confident, or preoccupied. They are often the convenient subjects of their children’s earliest work, sometimes painted from life and sometimes from memory or from photographs. Many of the women actively supported their children’s careers as artists by sitting as models or providing financial and emotional security. Others died young or raised their children in hardship and want. The images are excellent and the relationships between the artists and their mothers are vivid and concrete."

Charles McCarry's SHELLEY'S HEART in Commentary

D.G. Myers reviews Shelley's Heart, the masterful political thriller by Charles McCarry, in the May issue of Commentary: "Though McCarry distrusts abstract ideas, he is masterful at dramatizing their influence. Written in a fluent and sharp-toothed prose modeled upon W. Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, Shelley's Heart succeeds in creating an utterly believable world in which ideology has run amok. McCarry's portrait of the inner experience of an American radical is entirely convincing: "Correctness was virtue; belief was personal validity; doctrine was truth. All else was evil." So is his dystopian portrait of Washington's near future, in which deer run freely in the streets because of laws governing endangered species, thermostats must be set low and lights dimmed by government mandate, and terrorists have more advanced weaponry than the Secret Service because of budget cuts. McCarry is more interested in persons, the moral drama of men and women operating at crosspurposes, than in flogging a thesis. Although the "whole point" of America's elite institutions is to "turn out a type," as the President's lawyer says, Shelley's Heart contains no types—no "flat" characters in E.M. Forster's sense of having been "constructed round a single idea or quality." The life of every person in the novel is complicated by temperament, memory, and love or its lack. McCarry is particularly good at snagging personality on exact details: Julian Hubbard is a "compulsive diarist" and bird watcher, using "well-worn Zeiss binoculars" that his father had taken from "the corpse of an SS officer"; Franklin Mallory reads Macaulay's essay on Boswell's Life of Johnson with a pen in hand; President Lockwood greets his lawyers in an old University of Kentucky sweatsuit and thick socks; up close, Archimedes Hammett looks "like a Richard Avedon photograph of Muammar Qadaffi." Even better is that McCarry fully unfolds his characters dramatically—through their twisted histories and mixed-motive actions. McCarry is one of the few American novelists to have written with distinction about what Irving Howe called "politics as a milieu or mode of life." Shelley's Heart is a classic that examines how the American Left came to be and how potent the American Left still is. It might best be understood not as a conspiracy thriller but rather as a dark satire. Given how many of McCarry's wild surmises have become reality since its initial release, however, no one should make the mistake of attempting to compartmentalize his remarkable novel."

Dan Van der Vat's THE DARDANELLES DISASTER in Library Journal

Naval historian Dan Van der Vat's new book, The Dardanelles Disaster: The Extraordinary Story of Churchill's Most Spectacular Defeat , is reviewed in Library Journal: "In 1915, the Royal Navy and Allied troops sought to open the Dardanelles strait, which the Ottoman Empire had closed to the Allies in 1914. The operation was overseen by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, and it was a massive failure that devolved into the horrific Battle of Gallipoli. Van der Vat provides a narrative, hewing very much to maneuver details, both in battle and in Whitehall offices, and then indicating how the World War I Turco-German alliance impacted not only that war's duration but the course of history to come. Van der Vat aims at general readers, but will also interest strict military history enthusiasts."

THE ARTIST'S MOTHER: Great Painters Pay Tribute to the Gals Who Rocked Their Cradles

The Artist's Mother, reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot on Flavorwire: "It’s a simple idea but a powerful one — and perhaps the single greatest Mother’s Day gift idea of all time. The Artist’s Mother collects depictions of the maternal unit across six centuries of Western art history giants. There’s the iconic Whistler from 1871 of course — he really inspired the project, and like many, his portrait of mom went on to be his most famous work. Also in the pages, Toulouse-Lautrec — whom one never really thinks of as having a mom, and it turns out she was a Countess (pictured here) — plus Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, Picasso (with a pair of pictures of his mom: a haunting, candlelit love letter with no cubism in evidence from when he was only 15; and a later example from 1923, by which time his style had completely altered yet he restrained his avant-garde impulses in favor of elegance on this occasion), and even a rare 1974 Andy Warhol. If it’s true that we all become our parents, then maybe painting our mothers can be seen as predictive self-portraiture, an especially poignant notion when you look at the 15th century Durers and the 17th century Rembrandts in the book, and think about how famous both men became for obsessively depicting themselves. The collection is introduced with a moving essay by Judith Thurman entitled “A Mother’s Gift, A Child’s Homage” in which we discover that mothers really do get excited when their kids immortalize them on canvas."

Penny Vincenzi's WINDFALL Coming In October 2009

For all you Penny Vincenzi fans, here's some very good news: Windfall will published by The Overlook Press in October 2009. A number one bestseller in Britain, Windfall is perhaps Penny Vincenzi’s most riveting family saga yet; a mesmerizing story of one woman's very complicated inheritance. After smashing successes with the American publication of six of Vincenzi’s "marvelously engrossing" (Barbara Taylor Bradford) novels, Overlook is thrilled to offer Windfall for American readers for the very first time.

THE ARTIST'S MOTHER in More Magazine

The Artist's Mother is featured in this month's More magazine: "Mother as muse may not be a common theme in art history books, but great painters have often paid homage to the women who raised them. In The Artist's Mother, the editors at the Overlook Press have collected, for the first time, 36 portraits of famous artists' mothers: Anna van Gogh taught her son Vincent to draw, and Katherine Cassatt, a Victorian matron, encouraged her daughter Mary's bohemian lifestyle. While their offspring have long been anointed as geniuses, these women finally have their place in history too. Its one that is much richer than oil on canvas." —Rebecca Adler Warren

Joe Bennett's WHERE UNDERPANTS COME FROM in Publishers Weekly

Coming this summer, and not to be confused with Sima's Undergarments for Women, is Joe Bennett's Where Underpants Come From: From Cotton Fields to Checkout Counters--Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy. Funny, wise and insightful, this new volume has just been reviewed by Publishers Weekly: "British travel writer Bennett informs and endears in his quixotic quest to trace the provenance of his underpants in order to learn something about the “commercial and industrial processes on which [his] easy existence depends.” Despite his publisher’s misgivings, the author travels to the outskirts of Shanghai, posing as an underwear buyer and scheming his way into factories and showrooms to piece together the (increasingly) mysterious origins of his underpants. He heads toward the cotton factories, where few Westerners venture and the population is ethnically closer to Afghan than Chinese, and sober accounts vie with marvelously silly escapades around Bangkok and rural Thailand in search of rubber trees (or more specifically, the origins of his elastic waistband). Bennett’s education in the world of global commerce sparkles with humor and sharp observations on modern China’s competing strains of enduring Confucianism, vestigial communism and the government’s ruthless economic ambitions."