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.