HER BODY OF WORK
Cici James, founder of Science fiction bookstore Singularity and Co. in Brooklyn, poses for a body-painted portrait amongst her wares.
Books & Authors
THE EARLY BLURBS
There is in publishing the fine old tradition of blurbing, in which the author of a book, and/or his agent and/or his editor, contact certain friends and associates who might be predisposed to like a new book, and to ask them to read the book and, if they like it, to write a short statement …
RUSH RANTS
Last year I did some work for Marlo Thomas on a thoughtful, encouraging, positive book called It Ain’t Over. . . Till It’s Over about women reinventing themselves at mid-life. For some reason, the odious Rush Limbaugh decided to shit all over this book, somehow charging that when Thomas encourages the impulse to better oneself, …
DEATH OF A QUEEN
On Friday, April 11, Rizzoli Bookstore, a small capital of civilization and culture on West 57th Street, closed its doors. A victim of rising rents and falling readership, Rizzoli was a great place to kill time; it always made one feel connected to larger, smarter, more beautiful world. Rizzoli’s owners hope to resurrect the store …
BUSHKIN IN WOODSTOCK
On Sunday April 6th, a rather glorious day, I drove up to Woodstock to attend the Biographers Panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival, where my friend Henry Bushkin was holding forth about his memoir Johnny Carson. The panel, which was hosted by Will Hermes, a music writer who is working on a biography of Lou …
SPEECH OF GLORY
I had the pleasure on Friday night to attend a lecture at Concordia College by one of my favorite authors, Nathaniel Philbrick. He was invited by the Bronxville Historical Society to deliver the 16th Annual Brendan Gill Lecture, named after the eminent New Yorker writer and ardent preservationist. Philbrick’s subjects, with the exception of his …
BEST BOOKS
On December 20th, Janet Maslin of The New York Times listed her Ten Favorite Books of 2013. Among them: “JOHNNY CARSON by Henry Bushkin (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). That rare celebrity tell-all by an author who knows whom and what he’s talking about. Perhaps Mr. Bushkin, a young lawyer in 1970, should have wondered why …
PERFECT FOR HOLIDAY SHOPPING
Among this year’s projects, coffee table books for The New York Times, Life and Time, as well as The Book of Levon. All four titles are available in print or electronically from Amazon, except The Book of Levon, which is available in print from lulu.com Trat you rafmily, treat your froends, treat yourself.
ELMORE LEONARD’S TIPS FOR WRITERS
Elmore Leonard, the great novelist, died on Tuesday at 87. Too often pigeon-holed as a crime genre specialist, Leonard was a brilliant stylist and a peerless entertainer. Todayt the critic Janet Maslin noted that while Leonard ‘s novels were frequently adapted for the screen, none of the movies were better than the original novel. I …