The task: Turn this spam headline into something entertaining: Police end funereal striptease acts.
The format: Short story, comic, photo essay, pop tune, whatever, as long as it is bloggable
The prize: A box of awesome from tryharderland sent straight to your door!
The deadline: Friday, July 3

Want to enter? Of course you do. Go here.

Item! Tri-named virtuoso John Dermot Woods has a sweet offer for those who pre-order his forthcoming novel by July 15.
Details go a little something like this:

My novel (with drawings), The Complete Collection of people, places & things, is being published by BlazeVOX Books next month. To celebrate we’re offering the book for $12 with free shipping (that’s 25% off) to everyone who pre-orders by July 15. AND, the first 50 people who order will also receive:
- a signed and numbered silkscreen print, to commemorate the book’s release
- a personalized copy with a signed, limited edition book plate

Take advantage of John’s generosity right here.

Item! I once played a newsboy in a production of Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. My only line was “Extry, extry, read all about it!”
Delivered with gusto, and a little tweed cap.

Front page of the hometown paper today.

Via the local paper, obvs.

My point is, this is going be in the running for Great American Novel status, even (especially) if it is “nonfiction.”

Let me tell you another story first: I once saw a man with his remaindered books. They were in three cardboard boxes that had been unsealed and they were all that was left. The phone had rung; it was official. These books would be more valuable as pulp than as books. It was like having a dead body in the room. I understood the rules, but I still wanted to drape a sheet over those gaping boxes, or close them, or bury them. Books are meant to be the permanent ones, aren’t they? The things that will become archaic yet outlive us and our blogs. For me and perhaps for you books are anchors in time and space and memory — not the idea of books, not the stories within them or stories about them, I mean the books themselves, the tangible things.

The problem with tangible things, of course, is that they are subject to the laws of economics. Costs must be calculated against benefits and that means the bill from the warehouse vs. the revenue projections. I can accept this. Actually, I embrace this, most of the time. The laws of supply and demand will outlive us and our blogs and our books, and the system has its ways of working, however strange it seems. Like democracy (and like me) (and you too) the system is flawed and noble, full of hope and probably, ultimately, hopeless. It helps me sleep at night.

Back to the story.

I found out about this book called YOU or the Invention of Memory just last month, even though the copyright date is 2007. The book’s story is this: the book was published and then its small publisher “folded,” is the word that gets used, and what a pleasant but inaccurate thing to think of a small publisher being turned corner to corner, in half then again, and tucked away in a cedar chest. Really, though, what got tucked away was this book. Fell through the cracks! Dustbin of history! Crammed under some old towels in the cedar chest of forgetting! Tough break, man. Too bad you spent all those months writing that book that no one will ever read. Cue nagging grief, two years.

At which point the book’s author picked himself up and did what any right-thinking artist these days does: he emailed a publicist. Not just any publicist, either, but the smart and discerning Lauren Cerand, whose work I have admired for quite some time. [She is one of perhaps five publicists about whom I can make that statement.] This touched off a classic “girl meets book” plotline, followed by a “new publicity campaign” denoument, or should I say exposition? Rising action?

In order to help the author character tell the book’s story, the book publicist character began mailing copies of the book, for free, to anyone who sent an email requesting one. I heard about this offer on Twitter, in a sentence that must have contained fewer than 140 characters. I sent an email with my address information, and after a brief interlude in which the United States Post Office forgot the way to Maine, a copy of YOU arrived on my doorstep.

I opened the envelope and turned the book, which is pleasantly slim, over in my left hand. The NYTBR blurb on the back jacket refers to the author’s previous collection as “more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer.” In this context the word “underappreciated” is meant to convey both the quality of the author’s work and the quality of the NYTBR, for recognizing the quality of the author’s work when few others did. Perhaps also the quality of you, for the discerning taste that led you to hold this underappreciated thing in your left hand. Pats on the back all around.

(A pause for honesty. I am not well-versed in modern fiction. I lack the, ahh, the critical faculties. Left to my own devices I tend to read nonfiction about manufacturing and/or political intrigue. I become impatient with books about Love & Relationships unless there is also a good description of a factory strike or a corrupt governor or a boss with bad intentions. The author of YOU is the father of a filmmaker whose films I don’t like except this one.)

But this is a rare moment, an adventure! An owl, if you will, on my windowsill!

Cast in the role of reader, the reader character reads, and fortunately for the heroes — all of them — the book is good, funny and sad and gentle in its awareness of itself and the tricks it is playing. It is also, despite some shifts in setting, wholly steeped in New York. Listen:

I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every art work.

It is a sentence that would not apply in Boston, thinks the reader, who is now 70 pages in and feeling grateful for the experience. Not because YOU is the best book the reader has ever read — but then what is? — but because it is miserable and happy at the same time, a reflection on the twin ruts of longing and ambivalence. And also because it entered the story at just the right time and in just the right way, despite the system’s forces, a small reminder that a line is the shortest distance between two faces.

Tobias Wolff Wins $20,000 Story Prize

and then this video screencap:

And my first thought was 1. Included in this amazing $20,000 prize was the privilege of sitting on stage with John Darnielle! My second thought was 2. Or maybe sitting on stage with John Darnielle WAS the prize! Valued at $20,000! Third thought, overlapping: 3a. How would you value a thing like that? Maybe they asked Tobias Wolff for an estimate?/3b. Best prize ever!

Anyway, turns out none of it is related at all, the prize and the sitting on stage. Oh well.

Congratulations still deserved, Mr. Wolff.

YOU Or the Invention of Memory by Jonathan Baumbach and via Lauren Cerand’s brilliant New You Project

If I were a marketing person, I would have no idea how to market books to me. I guess maybe I read them all?