Go Ahead, Judge: The Best Book Covers of 2009
4:49 PM PST, November 20, 2009
You can find a link to the best covers voting on our Best Books of 2009 page, but if you're in a hurry, you can go straight to the voting page. The first round of voting, in which you choose your favorite in each of the ten categories, goes through December 7, and then they'll be a second round through December 17 to choose the Best Cover of 2009 from the 10 category champs. We'll be posting plenty more about covers here over the next few weeks (including interviews with designers and more), but let's just start off with our nominees. You can see larger versions of all these images on our voting page or on this page, but here's a quick thumbnail gallery of each category after the jump. I know which ones I love the best (here are a few), but I'm looking forward to seeing what the top choices will turn out to be from this lovely array. And if there are favorites of yours that have been left off the ballot (some of my personal favorites didn't make the cut either), please shout them out in the comments, and we can feature some of them on Omni later. (We're not the only ones doing this, by the way: I know that the excellent Book Design Review is going to hold their annual favorite covers poll, with a little twist this year, by asking three booksellers to make their own selections.) This one of the most fun things we've put together on the site recently, and we hope you'll enjoy it too. Fiction: Omni Daily News
12:17 PM PST, November 20, 2009
Oprah's Movin' On: Today Oprah Winfrey announced that the "The Oprah Winfrey Show"--the biggest daytime show in television history-- will come to a close during its 25th season. The last show will air on September 9, 2011. The multimedia icon and mogul is expected to launch a new talk show on her eponymous cable network. [Yahoo News via AP and The New York Times] Martin Amis' New Novel: In an interview in today's Guardian, Martin Amis talks about the genesis of his forthcoming novel The Pregnant Widow (coming May 2010), and counters claims that the story--which follows the lives a group of young people during the sexual revolution of the 1970's and the negative consequences of promiscuity for women--might be interpreted as anti-feminist. Amis "insisted that it was actually 'a very feminist book'." [The Guardian] Open and Shut Case: David Davis of the LA Times reviews Andre Agassi's just released autobiography, Open, and finds it an "inspiring acheivement." Don't miss Agassi's candid and touching video introduction to the book. [LA Times] Moving & shaking: Sportscaster Len Berman's The Greatest Moments in Sports lands in our top 10 Movers & Shakers following his discussion of history-making games on this morning's Today Show. --Lauren Graphic Novel Friday: "The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book"
7:59 AM PST, November 20, 2009
Rolling in like a slow, fuzzed-out guitar line from an Orange-brand amp, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book lives up to the good vibes promised in its title. ![]() Artist and writer Joe Daly's full-color graphic novel collects two stories starring best buds Dave and Paul, as they wander about Cape Town while fully under the influence. Dave has a genetic disorder he calls "monkey feet," where his feet have what appear to be opposable digits. Throughout the book, Dave tries to overcome insecurities stemming from this oddity, and Paul tries his best to compliment his friend's feet ("You're a lucky dude, Dave…I guess."). In the first story, Paul drops in on Dave, sheepishly asking to borrow money, but Dave's internal monologue betrays a bit of resentment from past experience. No clichéd flashbacks or expository dialogue break the moment, though, and it passes sharply. The duo share a friendship so realized that I wondered if I hadn't somehow missed an earlier volume or two. This may sound like a strange compliment, but the color separation in The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a highlight. It's clean, crisp, and exact. In one panel, Dave is in an apartment surrounded by frogs, each with individually-colored patterns and pigmentation. One leaps from a pool of water, giving off a splash that sends droplets of blue about the room and onto Dave. Daly is careful to separate this blue from the tint in the sky that lies behind Dave through an open window. The attention to detail only deepens as Dave and Paul cruise the city in Dave's "cool old car," past a shipyard, into a rainforest, and more. Cape Town feels and looks like Cape Town, so much that it is easy to take for granted as the story opens wide. Having recently finished Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, I couldn't help but consider The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book as a distant third-cousin to those titles. Daly's work includes the psychedelic mystery elements from Inherent Vice (the aforementioned apartment full of hallucinogenic amphibians and a quest to locate a capybara named "John Wesley Harding"--yes, named after the Bob Dylan album), and all the spacey dialogue from Chronic City ("That was a really great moment when Kermit the Frog and Ray Charles sang together on The Muppet Show, hey, dude?"). The bad news is that I could not find more Dave and Paul stories, but the good news is that I wanted to. In my search, I found that Joe Daly has an earlier book, Scrublands, and a new title arriving later in 2010 called Dungeon Quest: Book One (all of his books are from Fantagraphics). While waiting for the latter, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a weekend read, best consumed with your feet propped up, opposable digits or not. --Alex National Book Awards: A Newcomer's Point of View
9:17 PM PST, November 19, 2009
The National Book Awards for first-time attendees like my wife Ann and me constituted a kind of blur of sharp-dressed men and women, most of them graying a bit but still elegant, mixed with a few twenty-somethings running around on the fringes like the kids at a bar mitzvah. The location, with its high ceilings and spectacular dome, perfectly lit, conveyed a sense more of publishing’s memory palace than of its harsh reality right now. At the same time, you could hardly blame editors and writers, publishers and agents, for wanting to engage in a high-end collective sigh of relief that, despite many grim indicators, the whole thing hasn’t yet gone bust. Gore Vidal in his wheelchair proved a compelling figure—obviously frail but clear-headed, able to spin a story, and quite interesting. Sean Hannity and Harvey Weinstein (or a good look-alike) chatting provided a moment of severe dislocation. Dave Eggers at times seeming to want to fade into the wall was interesting. For an outsider who didn’t know many of the faces, I felt a certain frustration that there weren’t better ways to identify the nominees—Young Person’s Book nominee Laini Taylor’s pink hair made her easy to locate, but otherwise I had to rely on the overhead monitors, which periodically showed book covers and the corresponding author. Although I overheard several cynical responses on press row to, for example, Gore Vidal’s speech, I never thought any part of the evening lacked sincerity, and there were several moments of genuine emotion. The interplay between Vidal and Joanne Woodward, for example, was a rare example of a private moment in a public space. Eggers talking about his pirate shop in San Francisco, which serves as a kind of front for education and for reading, evoked for me a real sense of not only books still being viable and important but also reaffirmed the idea that each of us can make a difference. Having a chance to meet the genuinely sweet Junot Diaz was a treat for both me and Ann. Some people have a kind of presence about them that makes you glad to know them, and Junot is one of those people. But we behaved ourselves, and Ann got a real kick out of the whole shindig. Next morning, of course, many of those in attendance went back to cramped offices and marketing meetings about how to best take advantage of the upcoming holiday season. I had actually spent the day meeting with editors as preamble to the awards ceremony—a nice lunch with my editor David Cashion at Abrams about the Steampunk Bible I’m working on, a late afternoon meet-and-greet with Diana Gill at HarperCollins, who just bought our anthology Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Editors are still buying books, and unlike the banking industry and loans to small business, they seem to be buying more of them again. Does it mean anything? It might not, but the entire day seemed to serve as a reminder that publishing is indeed not dead. More on the National Book Awards over the weekend--and don't forget to check out the archive of the live coverage here and Tom Nissley's great round-up post here. Omni Daily Crush: "Changing My Mind"
6:00 PM PST, November 19, 2009
She seems wonderfully open to absorbing influence, while retaining her core intelligence, warmth, and wit--that's clear from her novels, but also from her critical essays, which are not distant pronouncements or summaries, but almost physical engagements with her reading (or watching, as in the case of her movie reviews or her excellent pieces on Katherine Hepburn and the love of a particular kind of British comedy she shared with her father). When she writes a piece comparing two recent novels (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder), it's as if she's trying both their styles of fiction on for herself (and one imagines part of her rougher treatment of Netherland is that it's closer to the kind of writing she's done in the past and wants to outgrow). Her only essay in the collection that's directly about her own writing, "That Crafty Feeling," is one of my favorites, especially for the way she talks about her openness to influence. She acknowledges that some writers can't read other writers at all while they are working on their own books, but (also like Lethem) she's the opposite: "My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight." And the influences extend from book to book:
There's an ease to all of this river-crossing, it seems, just as there appears to be in her unfailing graceful sentences. But one of her further charms is that she's always looking to turn a story like that against itself, and so in her brilliant piece on Barack Obama and Pygmalion, she acknowledges the costs of such transformations through the words of others. She discusses her own hard-earned speaking voice, "the rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place," which was not the voice she grew up with. Thinking that she was adding a voice through her education, she has since found that she lost the other:
Regrets or not, you get the feeling that her voice, along with her mind, will continue to change, in her novels as well as in these lovely, brilliant essays that are their equal. --Tom
In topics: Literature
Omni Daily News
11:28 AM PST, November 19, 2009
Dream Big: Four years ago, author Stephenie Meyer had a life-changing dream about a vampire in a meadow. 70 million copies later, it appears she was correct to act on it. Basketball Jones: Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum and I are on the same page: this is a great year for hoops books. Style Candy: New York Times bestselling author Lauren Conrad will be sharing her fashion sense next fall with her first nonfiction book, Lauren Conrad Style. Moving, Shaking, and Cooking: After his Top Chef performance last night, Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook occupies the top spot on our Movers & Shakers list today. The 2009 National Book Award Winners
12:23 AM PST, November 19, 2009
The winners:
YA Wednesday: Done with Vampires?
12:23 AM PST, November 19, 2009
Tonight at the National Book Awards ceremony, GalleyCat "prowled the red carpet" asking the nominees: What do you think of the Twilight books?
Quick links... Shona, a blogger, starts the Rory Gilmore Books Project, in which she sets out to read 260 books mentioned, shown, or joked about on the Gilmore Girls. (via Book-a-rama.) Variety calls New Moon, the movie, "as good as Twilight and arguably a shade better."
Tired of vampires yet? You're not the only one. Stephenie Meyer tells Oprah.com: "I'm a little burned out on vampires right now." Happy reading!--Heidi Jeff Brings His Booklife to Seattle
3:51 PM PST, November 18, 2009
So while Jeff and Ann get all gussied up in New York for tonight's National Book Awards, here is Jeff talking about what a booklife really means in 2009. (Pardon the background pub chatter: we call that "atmosphere.") My first question, after being somewhat daunted, as I'm sure some writers will be, by all the possible routes to getting your work out there he describes in Booklife--and having seen in practice how many of them Jeff uses, often in the space of a single day--was: do you have to be a whirling, multi-platform dervish like Jeff VanderMeer to live a modern booklife?
Then, taking from his comment that he had "laid bare" his own methods and writing career in Booklife, I asked if the new writer's life demanded that he or she erase the line between public and private life? How do you draw the line, when the culture demands that you erase it?
--Tom 2009 National Book Awards: Updates on Winners Tonight on Omnivoracious
3:51 PM PST, November 18, 2009
This evening I'll be reporting back from the National Book Awards here in New York City, technology permitting. Check back at this blog entry from about 9pm EST on, and I'll be posting results to the comments section as an easy low-tech way to get you the information. In the meantime, I'll try to comment on the preamble to the awards as time allows. To refresh your memory, here are the nominees. Fiction:
Nonfiction:
Poetry:
Young People's Literature:
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About this blog
Mix one part casual anthropologist with two parts avid reader, add the occasional culinary inspiration and a penchant for haiku, and what you end up with is Anne Bartholomew. When she's not working her way through the books on her nightstand, Anne tests new recipes and wishes she could write like Billy Collins.
Dave Callanan is a full-contact reader. A quick glance at him immersed in a book will always reveal the title's genre. He grins broadly with comedies, furrows his brow at dramas, and nervously bites his lip during thrillers. It's no surprise that even on a crowded bus, the seat next to Dave is rarely taken. Daphne Durham: Rarely seen without a book, she reads while walking to work, at red lights, and before the movie starts. She keeps a "just in case" book in her purse for emergencies (like an extra long line at the grocery store). Reading taste ranges from literature to pure trash. Jon Foro is not ogling you; he just wants to know what you're reading. A word freak since age six when he ordered his first Big Boy Book with a coupon clipped from the back of a Cheerios box ("Hardy Boys 53: The Clue of the Hissing Serpent"), Jon enjoys ancient history, literary stylists (Nabokov and Amis), true-life adventures & nature writing (Abbey, J.W. Powell), and books about bears. Lauren Nemroff insists on carrying her own bag (purse, suitcase, backpack, or beach bag). Not because she thinks chivalry is dead, but because it usually contains several pounds of books. The contents: new fiction, the latest art and photography books, mysteries and thrillers, a section of the Times book review, and a vintage Amazon bookmark (ca. 1998). Tom Nissley knew he wasn't like the other kids when they assigned Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native" in 10th grade and he spent dreamy afternoons in Wessex with Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye (Eustacia Vye!) and then came back to school to find that everybody else thought it was "boring." Once called "the Cameron Crowe of the food world," Brad Thomas Parsons balances his pursuits equally between all-things literary and culinary. He has interviewed Mario Batali, Danny Meyer, Ina Garten, Anthony Bourdain, Giada De Laurentiis, and Marco Pierre White, along with Jon Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Don Rickles, Sarah Vowell, and Chuck Barris, among others. He is a regular guest on Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen where he offers commentary on trends in cookbooks and food lit. Other Contributors: Heidi Broadhead and Paul Hughes have just started raising their first child, Silas, amidst piles of well-loved books. In utero, the little guy heard a steady stream of plays (including Macbeth and King Lear more than once) and poetry (by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara). Now Silas is more likely to have Entertainment Weekly, the Sunday New York Times, or some random blog post read aloud to him, as his parents try to catch up on sleep and rejoin the world. (Until he can read on his own--and hopefully not even then--Silas will not be exposed to the NYT Sunday Styles section.) Mike Smith reads a lot about geology, languages, and British history, and is working his way through an ad hoc self-made syllabus of British literature to cover up the gaps from his feckless undergrad days. As an adolescent he read way too much Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Alistair Maclean. He is a staunch supporter of the Oxford comma. Jeff VanderMeer's sense of adventure is so strong that as a kid he hoped he’d lose his eye in a tragic accident so he could wear a pirate patch. Maybe that's why as an adult he likes fantasy, SF, horror, magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, and whatever-you're-calling-it- over-smokes-and-coffee-this-morning. An author inspired by everything from Nabokov through Hindu superhero comics and Hong Kong cult action films, he has been known to write about squid, frogs, and fungus. Once, he wanted to be a marine biologist, but only so he could putter around in tidal pools. Blogs We Read
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