My wife‘s first novel, Temporary Superheroine, a comic book style adventure, was just reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and the verdict was, well … read it for yourself.

Considering PW hated, hated, hated my zombie short story collection What Will Come After, it seems to me that by comparison this reviewer is (to switch around a cliché) praising her with faint damns.

After all, considering a PW reviewer felt the authorial voice of the stories in my collection created “a monotony that undermines any excitement,” for Irene to be told that “the work fails to deliver any new insights or ironic commentary” is almost a compliment.

Regardless, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

So why not discover for yourself whether you agree with the reviewer’s judgment of my wife’s insights and commentary by ordering a copy her book right now and reading it for yourself?

And while you’re at it, grab a copy of the sequel, too!

(Ain’t nepotism grand?)

The universe must really want me to tell you about the collage artist born Burgess Franklin Collins, who became known as, simply, Jess. And who am I to deny doing want the universe wants?

First, while reading the latest issue of the Paris Review, I came across a collage the artist had done in 1956 that made use of comics—and you already know how intrigued I am by collages like that.

Then (I assume because I wasn’t acting quickly enough), up popped a Publishers Weekly review of the book Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, which told me more about the former Manhattan Project radiochemist turned artist and informed me that the book’s “publication coincides with the beginning of a traveling exhibition of his work set for 2013 and 2014.”

So I guess I’d better share the image which intrigued me so, or else mentions of Jess will inevitably start creeping into every magazine I read! (more…)

Martin Amis was interviewed in the July 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly (as you can see, I’m way behind on that magazine) and had this to say about why he spent an unusually long time (well, for him, anyway) revising his latest novel:

Lionel Asbo took Amis a year to write and a year to revise. “I’ve never spent that long revising before,” he says. “A writer friend asked me, ‘What did you put in that wasn’t there in the first draft?’ My answer was ‘anxiety,’ there wasn’t enough anxiety in it. Books come out of a mixture of ambition and anxiety, and the anxiety has to match the ambition, that’s just how it works.”

I don’t know about you, but when I write, anxiety is far from my mind. When I write, I go to a place of peace, a space of almost spiritual contemplation. I am in that zone runners talk about, in which all the world falls away, and everything’s right with the universe.

But then, that’s just me. Who knows? Maybe anxiety is what’s been missing from my writing all along.

What do you think? Do I need to become a little (or a lot) more anxious to become a better writer?

Allen Pierleoni, who runs the Sacramento Bee Book Club, has a column in the February 21 issue of Publishers Weekly about his experiences dealing with authors … and audiences.

Fans don’t come off as being happy. Well, the male fans anyway.

Here’s what Pierleoni had to say:

Fans run the gamut, too. Most are upbeat and seem glad to be members of the club. But the mostly male science fiction/fantasy readers who’ve attended events for Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Brooks, and Greg Bear seem almost dour. In contrast are the female fans who flock to meetings that feature such authors as Diana Gabaldon, Rita Mae Brown, Perri O’Shaughnessy (the pseudonym for sisters Mary and Pamela O’Shaughnessy), Suzanne Brockman, and Karen Joy Fowler.

Are fans of Kim Stanley Robinson dour? And are fans of Karen Joy Fowler … not?

I wonder whether this is a difference only evident in fans who aren’t a part of organized fandom, that is, enthusiastic but non-convention-going readers. Fans, not faans.

What do you think? Because Pierleoni’s male/female observation isn’t a distinction I’ve ever noticed before.

Have you?

While we’re all celebrating the fact that the Comics Code is dead, here’s a document that takes me back to when it was very much alive. Let’s see how different things used to be, shall we?

Among the many facts we’re told by a July 20, 1976 newsletter put out by the Comics Magazine Association of America is that “there are now only about 400 wholesalers (against more than 700 not that long ago).” Horrors!

What else was new? “Veteran artist Joe Kubert has opened a school of Cartoon and Graphic Art, to train artists for comics, featuring a two-year course.” Wonder how that worked out?

Plus, “Publishers Weekly reports that sales of books in the first quarter of 1976 were better than in the first quarter of 1975.” (What? No info on how ebooks did during those years?)

Check out the whole thing below.

I’m way behind in reading Publishers Weekly, which will explain why I’ve only just now come across something intriguing from the September 28th issue. In a profile of Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Books, Goldin quotes from the book Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, by restaurateur Danny Meyer.

Goldin shares how Meyer responded when asked what principle guided him as a new small business owner. He supposedly said, “I don’t want to be the best restaurant. I want to be the customer’s favorite restaurant.”

When I first read that passage, I liked it. But once it started to sink it, I didn’t like at all.

Why?

Because I think an important clause is missing.

I might have accepted the quote if it had been instead written as, “I don’t want to be the best restaurant. I want to be the customer’s favorite restaurant as long as I can do so while staying true to myself.” Perhaps I’m supposed to take that as implied, but without reading the book from which the quote was plucked, I can’t be sure.

I’ve often said that I’d rather be hated for what I am than loved for what I am not. And that’s as true for my fiction as it is for any other other aspect of my personality. Sure, I’d love to be your favorite writer—but I need to be my own favorite writer first. If I have to like me any less in order to make you like me any more … well … it’s not going to happen.

It isn’t that I want my words to be disliked by anyone. It’s just that the most important thing is to be (to disagree with the first sentence from the Meyer quote) the best me I can be. If you end up liking my stories, too, that’s gravy for which I’m sincerely grateful. But as far as I’m concerned, Meyer’s second sentence will never trump his first.

I do want to be the best restaurant.

Novelist Lydia Millet was interviewed in the November 26th issue of Publishers Weekly on the occasion of the release of her new book, How the Dead Dream.

Here’s how she characterized her time working a staff job in magazine publishing before she chucked it all and devoted herself to her writing—

She did, however, land a copyediting job in Larry Flynt’s magazine empire. “I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.

&#151which makes the life of the science-fiction editor seem so mundane by comparison!