Maggie Shipstead Featured on Electric Literature

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Maggie Shipstead’s wonderful short story, “Angel Lust”, is featured today on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Electric Literature co-editor Halimah Marcus’ comments on the story:

EDITOR’S NOTE

When Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, asks his youngest daughter what she learned in school that day she answers, “Did you know a corpse can have a boner?” It’s not what she was taught, “It’s what I learned,” she clarifies, an important distinction in the world of Maggie Shipstead.

Angel lust, the phenomenon from which the story gets its title, is perhaps the last of life’s cruel jokes: a final pillar of desire, adjunct and useless, and unrequited by definition.

The story begins as Simon departs for his deceased father’s house, daughters selfishly in tow: “If he had to referee their squabbles and navigate their quicksilver emotions while sifting through his father’s possessions, he hoped the house would not seem so empty, or he hoped at least the emptiness would be neutral.” If only. Instead, the emptiness proves quite virile. His father’s possessions are souvenirs of his romance with Simon’s mother (who died suddenly of a brain aneurism at forty-eight), further evidence of desire having its own half-life, independent of bodies and their relationships.

As it turns out, postmortem boners have more in common with Simon’s love life than he would like to admit. Lust for his first wife has out-lived their marriage, while lust for his current wife is lifeless—bored, as he characterizes it, with her eagerness, her nubility. In a month he’ll be the same age as his mother was when she died, and already sex for Simon has become existential.

Tempting as it is to judge him, Shipstead undoes this temptation with her firm and empathic prose, supplanting our judgment with her understanding. She populates both “Angel Lust” and her wonderful novel Seating Arrangements with armies of vivid characters. Secondary or primary, young or old, male or female, each is given complete life, making her fiction window and mirror both, a view into others as much as a reflection of ourselves.
Halimah Marcus
Co-Editor, Electric Literature

SEATING ARRANGEMENTS (Knopf/Vintage) is out now in paperback.

Shipstead PB

FEARLESS Out in Paperback Today

Today is the official release day for the paperback edition of Eric Blehm’s FEARLESS (Waterbrook/Random House). Eric will be doing a 24-station radio tour starting this morning to talk about the book and honor Adam Brown.

Check out the great FEARLESS site where you can get updates, including links to Eric’s radio appearances after he finishes them today.

Fearless pb

Fearless is a vivid account of one man’s journey from all-American boy to all-American hero. Blehm’s writing takes you beyond the battlefield and right to the heart of the personal battles, sacrifices, and triumphs of one of America’s elite warriors. Anyone looking for an inspiring story of inner strength and courage will be richly rewarded by this book.”
—Eric Greitens- Former Navy SEAL and New York Times best-selling author of The Heart and the Fist

THE EFFECT OF HER Out Next Wednesday

Gerard Stembridge’s gorgeous new novel, THE EFFECT OF HER (Old Street Press) will publish on May 22nd in the UK and Ireland. 

John Banville has said about the book: “In The Effect of Her, with flair and great daring, [Stembridge] has written a fictional chronicle of the 1970s that is extraordinarily vivid, knowing and satisfyingly irreverent. The portrait of CJ alone is worth the purchase price.”

You can hear Stembridge discuss the novel on Ireland’s top morning radio show here

The gorgeous hardcovers arrived at our office yesterday. A perfect cover for spring: 

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Book Covers – Before and After

It almost goes without saying, but choosing a cover for a book is incredibly important. Every once in awhile, the cover designer can get it just right on the very first try, but usually there is a good amount of back-and-forth between the agent, the editor, the designer and the author to find the perfect design.

The New York Times recently ran a great slideshow of Book Covers: Before and After, showing designers’ thought processes as they move from the initial attempts to the final product. It’s really cool to see how a cover evolves.

Once everyone finally comes to an agreement for the hardcover, the process often has to be started all over again for the paperback! Book Riot recently did a “Cover Face Off” of Maggie Shipstead’s SEATING ARRANGEMENTS (Knopf/Vintage) hardcover versus paperback, which you can check out here.

Sometimes, a motif is carried from hardcover to paperback. For Elizabeth Percer’s AN UNCOMMON EDUCATION (Harper/Harper Perennial), you can spot the lovely bird on the both versions:

an-uncommon-education-by-elizabeth-percerAn Uncommon Education - Elizabeth PercerAnd for Samuel Park’s THIS BURNS MY HEART (Simon & Schuster), the color scheme and flowers were kept in both hardcover and paperback:

this-burns-my-heart

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Douglas Kennedy Tour Diary

Bestselling author Douglas Kennedy is busy promoting his newest novel, FIVE DAYS (Atria), and was kind enough to send us a little postcard from his most recent stop: Geneva. 

FiveDays

Last week I was at the Geneva Book Festival (le Salon du Livre de Genève), and did three public events in French where I had over 200 people at each public ‘rencontre’. Everyone I know and like should be published well in the French speaking world, because they still remain so wildly passionate about writers. And though the Swiss-Romande is not a huge market, it is nonetheless an important one. Because the Swiss read. As such the Salon was packed with readers and with stands from all the big French publishing houses.

But what remains most crucial to me about such festivals is the contact that you get to have with your readers. One incident from last weekend still stays with me: an elegant woman in her mid-sixties who approached me and said that I was her absolutely favorite novelist. After congratulating her on her excellent taste (that did make her laugh) she then revealed to me that my novel, ‘Leaving the World’, meant multitudes to her. Because it dealt with that sorrow beyond dreams – the death of a child – and her own daughter had died of cancer just two years ago. And she said something to me that will stay with me for as long as I am sentient:

“Reading your novel I realized that I was not alone”.

Taking her right hand in both of mine I told her that her courage was nothing less than extraordinary. While also thinking:

“Madame, you have completely justified my existence”.

Douglas Kennedy

Douglas’ FIVE DAYS tour schedule:

May 21
Noon
Fairfield Library
1080 Old Post Road
Fairfield, CT

May 21
7 pm
Darien Library
1441 Post Road
Darien, CT

June 5
7 pm
Ferguson Library
One Public Library Plaza
Stamford, Connecticut 06904

June 6
6 pm
Diane’s Books
Greenwich, CT

June 7
7 pm

Port Washington Library
One Library Drive
Port Washington, NY

June 19-22
Salon de Livre
Algers, Algeria

July 1
7 pm
Alliance Francaise
Colony Square, Plaza Level, Suite 561
1197 Peachtree St. Ne
Atlanta, Ga

July 15
7 pm
RJ Julia’s
768 Boston Post Road
Madison, CT

July 17
12-2 pm
Maine Coast Bookstore
158 Main Street
Damariscotta, ME

August 15
6 pm
Boston Public Library
700 Boylston Street
Boston, MA

August 21
12-2 pm
Portland Library
5 Monument Square
Portland, ME

December 17
6 pm
JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave
New York, NY

Douglas Kennedy is the author of ten novels, including the international bestsellers Leaving the World and The Moment. His work has been translated into 22 languages. In 2007, he received the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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