Because it is almost that time of year (Valentine’s Day!), who better than to share his thoughts on love than Douglas Kennedy—author of nine previous novels, including the international bestseller Leaving the World. Kennedy was recently the keynote speaker at the American Library Association Conference. Below is a choice excerpt from his 8 AM speech:
“I want to talk today about one of the biggest conundrums that we face during our lifetime – perhaps the largest difficulty we grapple with as sentient beings. It’s the thing we long for the most and, as such, also so frequently vexes and disappoints us.
Of course, what I am speaking about is: love.
Now I must begin by saying that discussing love at eight in the morning is hardly something I usually do. Rather, this is a subject best suited for a low-lit cocktail bar around ten at night, just after the third Manhattan or Gin Martini has been ordered, and the pianist is tinkling ‘My Baby Don’t Care About Me’ on the ivories, and a sort of sad ‘nostalgie’ has descended on the surroundings.
But here we are today discussing love at eight am – an hour when the only people in the world considering this subject are couples newly in love and sharing a post-coital breakfast together, or all those embittered, wounded, grieving souls sitting in a therapist’s office (been there, done that), venting on about why it all has gone so dreadfully wrong…
Now if I was to go around this room I am certain I would hear story after story about disappointment in love. The person who was so right for you but got away. The love you showered on someone who never reciprocated it. The love that soured and atrophied. The love that you dodged.
And if there is one thing I know about the human condition it is this: the biggest argument in life is the one that you have with yourself. As such a larger question arises: do we really believe that we merit happiness? When it comes our way, do we often find ways of sidestepping it?
My new novel, THE MOMENT , grapples with these large questions, but also with another profoundly difficult subject: the loss of true love.”
Whew! To read the full speech (and you should), click here.
Atria will publish THE MOMENT (9781439180792) on May 3, 2011. The novel centers around Thomas Nesbitt—a divorced, middle-aged American writer living a private life in rural Maine. He is confronted by his past when he receives a package postmarked Berlin and from “Dussman”—the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin during the height of the Cold War.
Douglas Kennedy on L-O-V-E and his new novel, THE MOMENT
The SOURCE – February 3, 2011
See below for an update on upcoming publicity for all Simon & Schuster adult imprints in this week’s edition of the SOURCE!
Congrats to LITTLE BEE – 50 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list!
Dirty Secret on THE BOOK BENCH
Jessie Sholl, author of the new memoir DIRTY SECRET: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding (Gallery, 9781439192528) was recently interviewed by Sally Law on The New Yorker‘s Book Bench. See below for an excerpt from the interview:
“The book’s title reflects how you felt for years about your mother’s hoarding. What made you decide to write about it in such a public way?
I never thought I’d write about my mother’s hoarding; I never thought I’d tell anyone other than my husband about it because I was so embarrassed. Also, I didn’t think anyone could possibly understand. But after I joined an online support group for the children of hoarders, and began to really consider the massive amounts of shame that we all carried around—for something over which none of us had any control—I changed my mind. My hope was that by getting the secret out, it would lose some of its power.
I also wanted to put a human face on hoarding, to move beyond the stereotype of the crazy cat lady. Hoarders shouldn’t be the objects of mockery. They’re real people who happen to have a mental illness. They also have feelings, pasts, and sometimes even children.”
To read the entire interview, click here.
Get the Reading Group Guide, here.
The SOURCE – January 27, 2010
See below for an update on upcoming publicity for all Simon & Schuster adult imprints in this week’s edition of the SOURCE!
Award News!
The 42nd NAACP Image Awards nomination were announced earlier this month and Simon & Schuster imprints has five finalists for Outstanding Literary Work!
Debut Author
FOREST GATE: A Novel (Free Press, 9781439172179)
Peter Akinti
Biography/Autobiography
I’M STILL STANDING: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen–My Journey Home (Touchstone, 9781416567486)
Shoshanna Johnson
Instructional
A BOY SHOULD KNOW HOW TO TIE A TIE: And Other Lessons for Succeeding in Life (Touchstone, 9781416566625)
Antwone Fisher
CHILDREN’S
MAMA MITI: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya (Paula Wiseman Books, 9781416935056)
Donna Jo Napoli (author) and Kadir Nelson (illustrator)
YOUTH/TEEN
OUT OF MY MIND (Antheneum, 9781416971702)
Sharon Draper
Click here for a list of nominees.
The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association’s nominees for this year’s Dilys Award (an annual award given to the mystery titles of the year which the member booksellers most enjoyed selling and named after Dilys Winn—founder of the first specialty bookstore of mystery books in the United States) were announced. SAVAGES: A Novel by Don Winslow (Simon & Schuster, 9781439183366) is one of the six nominees. The award will be presented at the Left Coast Crime convention in March 2011. Click here for the full list of nominees.
And in more (more) award news, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2010 awards over this past weekend—and Scribner had finalists in two categories!
Nonfiction
THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, 9781439107959)
Siddhartha Mukherjee
EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner, 9781416591054)
S.C. Gwynne
Autobiography
CROSSING MANDELBAUM GATE: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner, 9781416544401)
Kai Bird
Winners will be announced on March 10, 2010. To see the full list of nominees, click here.
And in even more award news, the Mystery Writers of America announced the nominees for its 2011 Edgar Awards on January 19th (the anniversary of namesake Edgar Allan Poe’s birth).
BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
THE SERIALIST: A Novel (Simon & Schuster)
David Gordon
GALVESTON (Scribner)
Nic Pizzolatto
BEST FACT CRIME
FINDING CHANDRA: A True Washington Murder Mystery (Scribner)
Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz
Click here for the full list.
Congrats to all!
“Books, Memory and the Twelve Bright Stars Scratched Across Page 302”
Take a minute on this busy (and very cold!) Monday to read Anthony Doerr’s essay on the joys of reading. I promise you, it’ll brighten your day. Doerr’s stunning 2010 collection of stories, MEMORY WALL: Stories (Scribner, 9781439190050) recently won the 2011 PNBA Book Award – to celebrate this fantastic honor, he wrote this fantastic essay, titled “Books, Memory and the Twelve Bright Stars Scratched Across Page 302.” Here’s a highlight:
“It is the weather in which one reads a book that interpenetrates the paper. It is the mood one is in, the mindset one carries, the hunger in one’s gut, the quality of the sunlight falling across the page. It is the little coffee stain on page 29, the twelve bright stars scratched ecstatically across page 302.
Maybe, rather than copies, a more precise way to think about books on the shelves of a bookshop is to think of them as something closer to recipes. The execution of a recipe, after all, depends on a thousand variables: elevation, humidity, the freshness of the vegetables, the temperature of the oven, the kind of metal in the pan, how much wine the cook has been drinking.”
Read the entire essay, here.
Earlier this month, Scribner published Doerr’s first collection of short stories, THE SHELL COLLECTOR: Stories (Scribner, 9781439190050). Click here to read an excerpt.
Left Neglected
Last week, Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice (Gallery, 978143915275; CD, 9781442336209) was in the S&S offices to celebrate the publication of her new novel, Left Neglected (Gallery, 9781439164631; CD, 9781442335394). Read Genova’s “Top Ten Best Things About My Trip to NYC” at her blog (http://www.leftneglected.blogspot.com/) to hear more about her visit! She’ll be blogging from the road on her tour, so be sure to check back in.
Also, tune in on Wednesday, February 2 when Lisa Genova will be a guest on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show.”
In more great news, Left Neglected is the #1 Indie Next List Pick for January and is one of GoodReads.com’s January Movers & Shakers!
In the novel, career-driven supermom Sarah Nickerson is the queen of multi-takers. One day she makes the near-fatal mistake of texting on her phone while driving. She suffers a brain injury and develops a rare syndrome called “Left Neglect.” To promote safe driving, Lisa Genova has partnered with iSpeech.org, which is a technology that powers DriveSafe.ly—an application that reads your text messages and emails to you while you drive. DriveSafe.ly can also respond to your messages. Learn more by visiting the Facebook page, here.
A recent BookReporter.com Review notes: ”
At times it is difficult for her audience to remember that Left Neglected is a work of fiction, a figment of a very creative imagination. Written in the first person, the book reads like a moving memoir of a young woman whose world has been turned upside down. It is hard to put down and practically begs to be read in one sitting, as it lingers with the reader long after the last page is turned. Genova certainly has found her literary niche.”
The SOURCE – January 20, 2011
See below for an update on upcoming publicity for all Simon & Schuster adult imprints in this week’s edition of the SOURCE!
“The finest work of literature ever written by an author named Snooki”
The one-and-only Snooki (a.k.a. Nicole Polizzi) has penned her own work of fiction about a young, single “guidette” renting a boardwalk beach house on the Shore—spending her days working at the local tanning salon and her nights on the boardwalk, desperately seeking love…Sound familiar?
Watch Snooki’s Top Ten reasons to read A Shore Thing (Gallery, 9781451623741) on the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
A Presidential Guessing Game
The buzz is already going strong about who wrote O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous (Simon & Schuster, 9781451625967). Check out www.OtheBook.com to join the guessing game.
Also, be sure to tune in to NPR’s All Things Considered on Tuesday, January 24 for an interview with Simon & Schuster publisher, Jonathan Karp.
Check out the links below for a full listing of pre-pub speculation:
Week 1/17:
NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Week 1/10:
POLITICO, POLITICO, POLITICO, GAWKER, NY OBSERVER, WASHINGTON POST, WASHINGTON POST, EW, USA TODAY, GALLEYCAT, HUFFINGTON POST, THE STRANGER, POLITICAL WIRE, WALL STREET JOURNAL, ABC NEWS, ABC NEWS, POLITICO, YAHOO, UPI, THE WEEK, NATIONAL POST, CBS NEWS, THE NATIONAL, WASHINGTONIAN, GLOBE AND MAIL
Week 1/3:
DAILY BEAST, POLITICAL WIRE, GAWKER, YAHOO, POLITICO, USA TODAY, UK DAILY TELEGRAPH, MONTREAL GAZETTE, EARLY WORD, UK GUARDIAN, WASHINGTON POST, VANITY FAIR, NEWSER, WALL STREET JOURNAL, ATLANTIC WIRE, DAILY BEAST, NY OBSERVER, DAILY BEAST, CNN, MSNBC, TORONTO STAR, NATIONAL JOURNAL, GUARDIAN
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