Salon.com > Books to watch out for http://www.salon.com Thu, 23 May 2013 15:45:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “The Rogue” embodies the art of the hatchet job http://www.salon.com/2011/09/22/mcginnispalin/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/22/mcginnispalin/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/politics//war_room/2011/09/21/mcginnispalin Describing the moment when he rented a house next door to Sarah and Todd Palin, Joe McGinniss writes how in "forty years in the business ... I've never had a piece of luck like this." But good books require more than a lucky break. "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin," officially released on Tuesday, has already received a fair bit of media attention. But its claims -- Palin snorted cocaine, has a subpar sex life and tramples on any foe in her path – actually arrive at a moment of limbo in Sarah Palin's political career. It's difficult to imagine how she will ever again hold elected office. She long ago left the governor's chair and has so far sidestepped the GOP's once wide-open presidential primary race. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have largely replaced her in the pantheon of Tea Party heroes.

Increasingly defined as a media sensation rather than a political insurgent, Palin will likely continue to exploit her celebrity status; she will rake in millions of dollars while keeping herself and her family in the public eye.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/22/mcginnispalin/feed/ 17 Right-winger foresees end of America http://www.salon.com/2011/09/13/rightwingpunditry/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/13/rightwingpunditry/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/politics//elections/2011/09/13/rightwingpunditry In his new book, "After America: Get Ready for Armageddon," conservative provocateur Mark Steyn takes direct aim at the dogma of "American exceptionalism," an ideological framework that now plays a role in American conservatism roughly equivalent to that which Marxism-Leninism played in the Soviet Union (everything that happens supports it, and nothing that happens can disprove it). Refreshingly, Steyn evidences little patience for the idea that America is unique in some fundamental and eternal sense. As he writes in the introduction:

"The United States joined the rest of the cosseted Western world in voting itself a lifestyle it was not willing to pay for ... the ‘bubble’ is not the property market or cheap credit. The bubble is twenty-first century America itself, from the financial sector to a wretched education system culminating in languorous, undemanding ‘college’ courses whose absurd soaraway prices were affected not a jot by the economic downturn."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/13/rightwingpunditry/feed/ 71 Today’s must-see viral videos http://www.salon.com/2011/07/14/viral_video_humilation_book_tardis/ http://www.salon.com/2011/07/14/viral_video_humilation_book_tardis/#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/07/14/viral_video_humilation_book_tardis 1. "The Jerk," revisited:

Ben Schwartz (from "Parks and Recreation") and Zooey Deschanel (from "Yelling at the L.A. Times") cover "Tonight You Belong to Me."

 So who did it better? Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, or these guys?

2. Doggie makeovers for people:

Last night's sketch "We'll Make You Look Like Your Pet"  on Comedy Central's "Jon Benjamin Has a Van" is just further evidence of the comedian's brilliance. Not that we needed any.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/07/14/viral_video_humilation_book_tardis/feed/ 5 Publisher pleads with fans: No spoilers for new George R.R. Martin book http://www.salon.com/2011/06/28/dance_with_dragons_george_martin_spoilers/ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/28/dance_with_dragons_george_martin_spoilers/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/06/28/dance_with_dragons_george_martin_spoilers  Fans of HBO's "Game of Thrones" may be grumbling about having to wait a year until next season, but for the millions who read the books on which the show is based, that may seem like a very short time indeed. George R.R. Martin's series "A Song of Ice and Fire" is a six-book fantasy series, but the fourth book came out in 2005 and there have been no releases since then. In the interim, fans have been getting kind of antsy, with many turning on Martin for taking so long to write the story.

Perhaps that's why, with 14 days left until the fifth book finally arrives in stores, Martin's publishers have made an official plea online to anyone in the U.K. who has an embargoed copy of "A Dance With Dragons" to refrain from posting any spoilers about the long-awaited tome. Also, they'd appreciate it if you stayed off of any unofficial "GRRM" sites, in case someone does decide to leak some crucial bit of information.

An excerpt from the post on Voyager Publishing's website, titled "A Plea to George R.R. Martin fans": 

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/06/28/dance_with_dragons_george_martin_spoilers/feed/ 20 Samuel L. Jackson, Werner Herzog narrate “Go the F**k to Sleep” http://www.salon.com/2011/06/15/samuel_l_jackson_go_the_f_to_sleep/ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/15/samuel_l_jackson_go_the_f_to_sleep/#comments Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/06/15/samuel_l_jackson_go_the_f_to_sleep Yesterday we featured an interview with "Go the F**k to Sleep" author Adam Mansbach, who managed to make it to the New York Times bestseller list with a status update-turned-children's book. Now we're hearing word that acclaimed German director and actor Werner Herzog is getting ready to do an audiobook recording for Masbach's hit, turning lines like "The flowers doze low in the meadows / And high on the mountains so steep. / My life is a failure, I'm a shitty-ass parent. / Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep," into something much darker and treacherous than your normal "Curious George" story.

Then again, a Herzog impersonator has been doing children's book readings on the Internet for over a year now, including "Winnie the Pooh" and "Where's Waldo." Having the actual Herzog read "Go the F**k to Sleep" could hardly be an improvement on the parodies, but it's exciting nonetheless.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/06/15/samuel_l_jackson_go_the_f_to_sleep/feed/ 8 Moby Awards honor best, worst book trailers of 2011 http://www.salon.com/2011/06/03/moby_book_trailer_awards_2011/ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/03/moby_book_trailer_awards_2011/#comments Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/06/03/moby_book_trailer_awards_2011  On the surface, book trailers seem like a fairly ridiculous concept: trying to market literature to people who would rather wait until the movie version comes out. Most of the time, publishing houses create trailers that are visually arresting or entertaining, but have nothing whatsoever to do with the book they're trying to sell. That's where the Moby Awards  come in.

Celebrating the best and the worst of book trailers with a statuette of a golden sperm whale, last night's Second Annual Moby Awards were held at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. With categories like "Most Celebtastic Performance," "Best Small House Press Trailer" and "What Are We Doing to Our Children? (good or bad, you decide)," the ceremony is more tongue-in-cheek McSweeney's party than Paris Review gala.

According to Salon's senior book writer and Moby Awards judge Laura Miller, the best book trailer of the year didn't even take home a prize, though it was nominated in the category for best "Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object":

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/06/03/moby_book_trailer_awards_2011/feed/ 4 Jennifer Egan and Laura Miller discuss “A Visit from the Goon Squad” http://www.salon.com/2011/04/21/jennifer_egan_interview/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/21/jennifer_egan_interview/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:22:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2011/04/21/jennifer_egan_interview Days before winning the Pulitzer Prizer for fiction for her remarkable "A Visit From the Goon Squad," Jennifer Egan appeared on stage at the New York Public Library with Salon book critic Laura Miller, as part of the "Live from the NYPL" series. A video of their fascinating conversation can be seen below.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/21/jennifer_egan_interview/feed/ 5 Neil Strauss on rock stars, Charlie Sheen and the art of a good interview http://www.salon.com/2011/03/18/neil_strauss_interview_everyone_loves_you/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/18/neil_strauss_interview_everyone_loves_you/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/03/18/neil_strauss_interview_everyone_loves_you I was nervous before going to meet Neil Strauss, whose new book, "Everyone Loves You When You're Dead," is an anthology of his two decades of celebrity interviews. Despite his numerous books and hundreds of articles for Rolling Stone and the New York Times, Strauss will be forever known to the general public as the guy who wrote "The Game," which documents his experience in the "seduction community" along with famous pickup artist Mystery. Neil and I were going to take a 50-minute car ride from his hotel in Manhattan to a bookstore in Brooklyn where Strauss would be speaking, and -- not that I was worried anything would happen -- I was essentially locking myself in for a long haul with someone who has become an expert at psychological examination and dissection.

I shouldn't have been worried. Neil Strauss was more wary of me than I was of him. "You scare me as an interviewer," he says after I express my own trepidation. "Because the kind of person that is bad socially -- and I'm not saying you are, but you did say you were awkward socially -- but really trusts their fingers, they are scary to talk to. You don't know what they're thinking, and you don't know what's going to happen after they go home and get in touch with how they really communicate."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/18/neil_strauss_interview_everyone_loves_you/feed/ 10 Publisher confirms Julian Assange book deal http://www.salon.com/2010/12/27/wikileaks_book_deal/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/27/wikileaks_book_deal/#comments Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/12/27/wikileaks_book_deal Publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc. has confirmed striking a book deal with Julian Assange that the WikiLeaks founder says could be worth more than $1 million.

A spokesman for the New York publishing house says that "a principle agreement is in place" and that Assange is due to hand in a manuscript sometime in 2011. The book's publication date is yet to be determined.

Assange told The Sunday Times newspaper that he was forced into writing the book by financial pressures largely linked to his legal fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces sex crimes allegations.

Assange told the paper he would received $800,000 from Knopf, with another 325,000 pounds ($500,000) from U.K. publisher Canongate.

Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards declined to comment on the specific figures.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/27/wikileaks_book_deal/feed/ 11 Who will win the National Book Award for fiction? http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/judgement_day_national_book_awards/ http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/judgement_day_national_book_awards/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/11/15/judgement_day_national_book_awards When the five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction were announced last month, the lead in news stories was Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," the Novel Betrayed. Its absence occasioned the usual attack on awards, judges, critics and literary evaluation in general. But consider the numbers. When I was a judge several years ago, about 300 books were nominated by publishers. If judges ignore authorial reputation and chatter about the books, what are the chances that a book will make it into the final five? Say a hundred works are meretricious and nominated merely to please their authors. Now the possibles are down to 200 books, but if each judge gets to choose a nominee it's still only one chance in 40 that a book will make the cut. You might find distasteful this probabilistic analysis of the process -- "All books are not created equal," you say -- but I hope the numbers will diminish the consternation over Franzen's absence and will encourage readers to give the novels that are finalists a chance. Think of them this way: "Wow, these books beat 40 to 1 odds."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/11/16/judgement_day_national_book_awards/feed/ 9 When blue-collar pride became identity politics http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/when_blue_collar_dreams_became_identity_politics/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/when_blue_collar_dreams_became_identity_politics/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh//politics/2010/09/06/when_blue_collar_dreams_became_identity_politics The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the disastrous 1972 Democratic convention: "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!") Also, not a small matter: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War; again, most labor leaders supported it.

Still, the inability to forge a political movement that was as much about class as race and gender rights haunts the United States today. We saw the shadows of that struggle even in the 2008 presidential campaign, as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded charges of "racism" and "sexism," but few paid attention to the increasing openness of white working-class voters, especially men, to pick a Democrat again in a time of profound economic crisis. We see it today in the hostility of many Democrats, and the resistance of the Obama administration, to backing aggressive government action to address the continuing unemployment disaster. The decline of the labor movement hobbled the Democratic Party, and so far nothing has come along to replace it, to represent the great majority of Americans who are disadvantaged by the ever-increasing power of corporate America and the wealthy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/when_blue_collar_dreams_became_identity_politics/feed/ 161 Book matters http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/books_28/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/books_28/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald//2010/09/06/books (updated below [Tues.])

There are 3 items, all related to books, which I wanted to note for the holiday:

(1) Over the next few weeks, I'll be finishing my latest book, and am currently working with my editor -- without much success -- to select a title.  For my prior book, I strongly disliked the title chosen by the publisher ("Great American Hypocrites"), and when I objected, was told that if I produced a better one, that would be used instead.  After soliciting suggestions from various people, I submitted 10 alternatives, all of which were rejected as supposedly inferior to the one they had chosen.  I then held a contest right here on the blog, where I briefly summarized the book's themes and asked readers to suggest concise, creative titles (which is definitively not my forte).  Over 1,000 were suggested, many of them superb, and after selecting the 20 best ones and submitting them to the publisher, they again rejected them all and insisted that theirs was better (the reality was they were convinced they had the ideal title, were intent on using it, and the suggestion that they'd change if it a better one was found was a pretext designed to placate my strong objection to it).  That process nonetheless produced many outstanding suggestions, so I will try it again, this time with an editor who is genuinely open to title suggestions.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/06/books_28/feed/ 569 Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”: Brilliant portrait of our times http://www.salon.com/2010/08/31/jonathan_franzen_freedom/ http://www.salon.com/2010/08/31/jonathan_franzen_freedom/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/30/jonathan_franzen_freedom Now that we know that the world is filled with opinionated, neurotic busybodies and compromised idealists just like us, our contempt springs to the surface so easily. We resent recognizing bits of ourselves in so many others, seeing how much more effectively (and photogenically!) these people put their ideals into action, through their daily yoga classes and lucrative yet admirable jobs as environmental lawyers, through the whimsical crafts and organic layer cakes they make with their creative, adorable children, through the two-week vacations they take in Maui or the Wakefield dressers they refinish for junior's bedroom. Instead of bringing us together, the Internet shows us that we not only aren't remotely unique, but everyone else out there is pursuing the same lifelong dreams and embracing the same hobbies with far more focus, style and energy than we could ever hope to muster.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/08/31/jonathan_franzen_freedom/feed/ 29 Bond, James Bond, comes back for more in new novel http://www.salon.com/2010/05/27/eu_britain_new_bond_book/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/27/eu_britain_new_bond_book/#comments Thu, 27 May 2010 23:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/05/27/eu_britain_new_bond_book Chill the vodka and dust off the martini glass. James Bond is back.

A new novel featuring the world's most famous secret agent is set to be published next year, the family company of Bond creator Ian Fleming said Friday.

The as-yet untitled book carries the top-secret code name "Project X," and will be written by American novelist Jeffery Deaver, best known for his series of thrillers featuring forensic genius Lincoln Rhyme.

It's scheduled to be published May 28, 2011 -- which would have been Fleming's 103rd birthday. It comes nearly 60 years after the publication of "Casino Royale," the first novel to feature 007.

Deaver said Fleming's work was important to him, "both literarily and personally."

"They appealed to me as wonderful stories but they also stood as singular examples of a thriller writer's craft," he said in a news release. "I learned, through osmosis as well as design, much technique from Mr. Fleming's work: compactness, attention to detail, heroic though flawed characters, fast-pacing, concrete imagery and straightforward prose."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/27/eu_britain_new_bond_book/feed/ 1 New Obama book reveals Pentagon quarrel http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/us_obama_military_book/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/us_obama_military_book/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 23:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/05/03/us_obama_military_book President Barack Obama reprimanded top Pentagon officials last year for pressing publicly for a troop increase in Afghanistan.

That's according to "The Promise," a book on Obama's first year in office by Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter. It goes on sale May 19.

The book says Obama laid into Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen in an Oval Office meeting last October.

Obama was irked by the leak of a confidential report by Gen. Stanley McChrystal calling for an expanded military presence in Afghanistan, and by McChrystal saying he could not support a strategy relying on special forces and unmanned drone attacks.

Obama was conducting a lengthy review of operations in Afghanistan at the time. He largely sided with the generals and agreed to deploy 30,000 more troops.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/03/us_obama_military_book/feed/ 4 Millard Kaufman: The 90-year-old boy novelist http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2010/04/21/kaufman

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/feed/ 3 The cougar gets her due http://www.salon.com/2010/03/04/in_praise_of_older_women/ http://www.salon.com/2010/03/04/in_praise_of_older_women/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2010/03/04/in_praise_of_older_women When I wrote recently about Judy Blume's "Forever" being the mildly scandalous novel of choice for dog-earing and passing between adolescent girlfriends in the mid-'80s, I had no idea that boys did the same thing with titillating fiction -- or at least, they did 20 years earlier in the U.K. In Wednesday's Independent, John Walsh writes of Stephen Vizinczey's "In Praise of Older Women" -- which is being re-released as a Penguin Classic this week -- "Once we'd established that it wasn't some pervy encomium about grandmothers, it quickly became a favourite in school locker-rooms: copies were passed from hand to hand, pored and sniggered over, heads were shaken about the 'amorous recollections of Andras Vajda.'" After describing content way more salacious than anything Blume ever conceived, thank you very much, Walsh adds, "And to our head-spinning envy, the priapic Andras started his Don Juan career when he was our age. There it was, in black and white, on page 22: the little beast discovering oral sex at 12, from a soldier's wife in her 40s."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/03/04/in_praise_of_older_women/feed/ 10 January books: DNA, drugs and Patti Smith http://www.salon.com/2010/01/05/january_books_to_watch_out_for/ http://www.salon.com/2010/01/05/january_books_to_watch_out_for/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/01/04/january_books_to_watch_out_for Compiled by Salon staff, a short list of  upcoming works to keep your eye on.

Nonfiction

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