Charlotte Gill | author site & blog

March 20, 2009

This guy gives me hope

Michael Tamblyn, CEO of BookNet Canada, is unafraid of technology:

I can't explain this, but as an author I feel comforted by a publishing helmsman who can throw around a phrase like, "bring in someone who can hack some PHP and configure a database," and not sound like my mom trying to use the word "bling."

A fair question: "When was the last time you saw this on a publisher's website?: beta."

Via Q&Q.

March 11, 2009

In praise of dark books

Thank you, Steven Beattie:

Heller has hit on the precise word to describe this demand for uplift and sympathetic characters in fiction: infantile. It's almost pathologically regressive to demand that writers, who are supposed to engage with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, should spend their time rubbing their readers' backs and cooing about how everything's going to be okay before sending them off to bed with a cup of hot cocoa. Fortunately, there are writers--Heller, Richards, Barbara Gowdy, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq--who understand this. But it's unlikely any of them will be making an appearance on Oprah's book club any time soon.

March 6, 2009

Readings aplenty - Marina Endicott

Tonight @ Pages. Marina Endicott's readings are so good, you wish she could bottle and sell them.

March 3, 2009

Motherland

Am jetlagged from last week's trip to London, where it become immediately evident the benefits of living in a megacity that never sleeps when the trains come every two minutes instead of every hour. Where I ate tomatoes that were red instead of that insipid pink that make me somehow think of a fishy gene-splice. Where there were a lot of purple coats and high-heeled Mary Janes going on down the sidewalks. Where friends may or may not be anticipating the high finance shitcan. Where it is possible to be called an "international" by a bald old man whose mouth makes you bless North America for its dentistry alone. Even if it means you get to live in a place where the walk to work is not a fashionable trot but some kinda deep Antarctic break-up of slush and sloshing floes.