Bay Area Literary Tidbits

The New York Times featured a profile of Oakland writer Melanie Gideon, whose memoir, The Slippery Year, will be published by Knopf next week.

The title of the article: Car-Pool Epiphanies: A Memoir About the Ordinary, says a lot about the book. “Melanie Gideon does not have a story of divorce, death or abuse to tell. Nor does she write of recovery from cancer, drug addiction or even a miserable childhood,” says the article.

“This really is a book about nothing,” confirms Gideon, who is a write at San Francisco’s Writer’s Grotto.

Well, I have read the book, and while it is true the most dramatic plot element involved Gideon driving five hours to spy on her son while he is at sleep-away camp (either to make sure he is okay or just because she misses him so much) the book really is about finding happiness in ordinary life.

And her first chapter, when her husband buys a deluxe motor home, was so funny that I burst into laughter a half a dozen times.

Gideon will be at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland on August 12 as well at some other venues in the Bay Area.



Another Bay Area writer, Kathryn Ma, is getting lots of advance praise for her linked collection of stories, All That Work and Still No Boys.

Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of Prep and An American Wife, listed Ma’s book as one of her favorite five books on The Daily Beast. Sittenfeld even went so far as to predict that Ma would win the Pulitzer Prize for her work. (She also praises the work of Jennie Capo Crucet. Sittenfled selected both authors to win an Iowa fiction prize.)

“When Crucet and Ma become really famous and win Pulitzers, I plan to pretend I discovered them,” writes Sittenfeld.

In another contest, Stephen Elliot, the Grotto dweller, founder of The Rumpus, founder of The Progressive Reading Series, author of seven books, and self-declared masochist and wild man, was voted the Bay Area’s favorite writer.

Recent book sales by Bay Area authors, via Publishers Marketplace:

Sister Madonna Buder and Karin Evans's IRON SPIRIT: The Wisdom and Inspiration of Sister Madonna Buder, World Champion Triathlete, about the 79-year-old nun and Ironman competitor known on the circuit as the Iron Nun, to Marysue Rucci at Simon & Schuster, in a good deal, at auction, by Elisabeth Weed at Weed Literary.

Radio show host, magazine writer and frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle Tony DuShane's CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE JESUS JERK, loosely based on his experience growing up a Jehovah's Witness, to Anne Horowitz at Soft Skull, by Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary + Media.

Journalist (formerly with the SF Chronicle) and author Steven Winn's COME BACK, COMO: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog, to Carole Tonkinson at Harper UK, by Juliette Shapland at Harper, on behalf of the Amy Rennert Agency. (Foreign rights have also been sold to France, Holland, Poland and China)

Thomas Peele's KILLING THE MESSENGER: the Assassination of Chauncey Bailey and the Ruination of an American City, a chilling story of murder, journalism, politics and intrigue that investigates the brutal slaying of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, who was gunned down in 2007 for writing a story about Your Black Muslim Bakery, the business front of a violent polygamist cult, to Jenna Ciongoli at Broadway, in a pre-empt, for publication in Fall 2011, by Elizabeth Evans at Reece Halsey New York (NA).

Great Summer Reads

Selecting books for a vacation is a very delicate thing. There’s the temptation to keep doing what has sent you on vacation, i.e. read all those dense, history books that are part of a job. There's also the opposite impulse, which is to chuck it all and delve into the frothy, fun books that help you escape.

The tension between continuing and escaping work usually means a stuffed book bag, for the best part of vacation is refusing to make hard choices.

I’ve been in the beautiful Carmel Valley for the last three days and besides two jaunts to spectacular Pt. Lobos to search for sea otters, I have spent most of my time reading. Here are the books that I read:

The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon—There is a lot of pre-publicity buzz about this memoir by Gideon, who lives in Oakland and is a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Her publisher, Random House, flew her out to New York and hosted a luncheon for her with reps from many women’s magazines. It worked, as there are already lots of raves about the book, which will come out in August. Sara Nelson, the former editor of Publisher’s Weekly who now has a column in The Daily Beast, listed The Slippery Year as one of her top summer reads.

Gideon, 44, poses the question “Is this all there is to life?” Despite being married to a sweet, hard-working guy with only a few neuroses, living in a nice house in the hills and sending her son to an exclusive private school, Gideon isn’t sure she is happy. Should she settle for this middle-calss suburban life or strike out for more excitement? Will earthquakes or other natural calamaties hurt her family?

I have to say that I laughed out loud about 10 times while reading the first chapter of this book. It was a hoot. The rest of the book had fewer laugh out loud moments, but it was well-written and engrossing. It straddles the line between a beach read and serious literature, which in my view is perfect.

After finishing Gideon’s book, I picked up Gillian Flynn’s thriller Dark Places. Now I liked Flynn's previous book Sharp Objects a great deal, but I can already tell this is better. It tells the story of Libby Day, whose mother and two sisters were murdered by her brother. It’s twenty-five years later and Day is broke, so she agrees to talk to a “Kill Club” that is fascinated by old murders. Of course, visiting that group jolts Day out of her complacency and certainty that her brother was the actual killer. I can’t put it down.

If you doubt my opinion, consider that USA Today, Salon, New York Magazine, and NPR all selected Dark Places as a top summer read.

The history tome I brought was Harold Evans' The American Century. Evans is the British-born husband of Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and the current editor of The Daily Beast. Evans was the long-time editor of The Sunday Times in London and is an editor-at-large for This Week magazine.

This massive volume is a pictorial overview of the United States and it is incredibly well done. Evans touches on many social movements and the personalities behind them. I remember when this book came out 10 years ago. It was critically acclaimed. My copy is from the library but I think I want to buy my own copy. It’s the kind of coffee table book that will grab your attention and keep you turning the pages.

Stangely enough, it is also a perfect book for a vacation. While it is too big to lug to the pool, I like having one serious book to read and reflect on.

The Grotto: San Francisco's Book Factory

The Grotto, the South of Market writers’ collective, is proving once again to be a very lucrative place to work. Clearly there are many talented writers renting offices there, but it looks like the cachet of the place also provides an added value when selling a book.

Take this recent posting from Publisher’s Marketplace about one Grotto resident’s recent book sale:

Melanie Gideon's The Slippery Year, pitched as similar to Elizabeth Gilbert and Nora Ephron, a bittersweet and wise month-by-month account of the year in her life during which, upon turning 43 and confronted with her own mortality, she chooses to wake herself up, embrace the passage of time, identify what matters (and what does not) -- and "finally decide to live," to Jordan Pavlin at Knopf, for six-figures, in a pre-empt, by Elizabeth Sheinkman at Curtis Brown UK (NA).

The six-figure sale comes after an excerpt from the book appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love column. Gideon also wrote a well received children’s book called Pucker.

In the past year, nine of the Grotto’s approximately 30 writers have sold books. Many were sold for $300,000 - $600,000 and one may have even gone for more than $1 million. Writers are always happy to get big advances, but they don’t always want to advertise the fact, so I won’t attach numbers to names.

Some of the sales since January 2007:

Po Bronson, one of the Grotto’s co-founders, sold a “counter-intuitive examination of the new science of parenting,” to Jonathan Karp at Twelve. (He and Gideon use the same literary agency, Curtis Brown.) Now Karp’s imprint is called Twelve because it only publishes 12 books year. You know they look for books they think will sell a lot of copies, and that they pay their authors accordingly.

Jason Roberts sold Every Living Thing about the audacious, often-fatal program launched by scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), to compile a catalog of all life by sending acolytes to every corner of the globe (billed as "The Right Stuff of the 1700s"), to Star Lawrence at Norton, in a major deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in 2009, by Michael Carlisle at Inkwell Management.

Now “major deal” in Publisher’s Marketplace parlance means $500,000 and up. (I must reveal that Jason and I have the same agent.)

Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books: The True Story of a Rare Book Thief, A Book Detective, and the World of Literary Obsession to Sarah McGrath, executive editor at Riverhead Books, by James Levine

Allison and I are in a writing group together, North 24th, and I can vouch this will be a fascinating, utterly-compelling book. It came out of a piece she did for San Francisco Magazine. The article was included in the anthology The Best American Crime Reporting of 2007.

Ethan Watters', another Grotto co-founder, sold Crazy Like Us, exploring the imperialistic spread of the American perception of mental illness throughout the world, looking at the complexity of cross-cultural psychiatry, the spread of our syndromes around the globe, and the problems that come when the US inflicts its own definitions and treatment of mental illnesses and peculiarities on other cultures, to Dominick Anfuso at Free Press, in a pre-empt, for publication in January 2010, by Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic .

(Now pre-empt means a publisher likes a book enough to pay more than other publishers to guarantee they get it.)

NPR commentator Andy Raskin's The Ramen King and I: Searching for God in a Cup of Noodles, his quirky efforts to meet the inventor of instant ramen noodles, who died earlier this year at age 96, to Erin Moore and Bill Shinker at Gotham, in a pre-empt, by Stuart Krichevsky at Stuart Krichevsky Agency (NA).

Raskin also had a piece in the Modern Love column in the Times about love and looking for a parking space. See “pre-empt” again.

Rodes Fishburne sold Going to See the Elephant, following the picaresque adventures of a young man in San Francisco seeking to be the greatest writer of his generation and unwittingly igniting forces larger than he could have ever imagined, to Kerri Buckley at Bantam Dell, by Fredrica Friedman at Fredrica S. Friedman and Company.

Laura Fraser, the author of the memoir, An Italian Affair, recently sold another memoir.

Cameron Tuttle, the author of The Bad Girls Guides, recently completed a five-book deal.

Grotto filmmakers Xandra Castleton and David Munro apparently just found a distributor for their film Full Grown Men.

Do you think it is something in the water?