Unedited On The Road to be Published Next Year
Bibliophiles and English majors know the story about Jack Kerouac writing On the Road in a few weeks, without paragraphs or any breaks. Even feeding a new sheet of paper into the typewriter interupted his creative flow, so he wrote on long scrolls of paper, and taped them together.
Now Viking Penguin will publish this original version, which has a different first sentence, and a different ending and contains a sections that were censored from the version we’ve read.
Read more:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/07/27/kerouacs_road_will_be_unrolled/
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/28/unedited_on_the_road.html
The Purloined Letter
The Four Best Online Selling Non-Fiction Novels
Some of the best selling non-fiction novels are still doing great offline as well as on. In the case of Godless I definitely have to say controversy works but it is not a book that I would read.
Below is the top 4 books that have sold the most online copies recently.
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
1776 by David McCullough
Godless by Ann Coulter
Getting Published, part 7
So today’s the day I send hundreds of pages proposals & clips to my agent. I must admit, getting all this stuff together wasn’t as simple as I’d thought it would be…
The articles I’d published in magazines needed to be copied on a color copier–easy enough. But the articles I’d placed in e-zines and e-newsletters had to be ’snagged’ (using SnagIt, a program I adore), cropped, printed and finally color-copied. And my printer is a 10-year-old antique, so you actually have to sit there an manually feed paper into it (the paper-catching mechanism is finicky), so that wasn’t fun.
But now that it’s (thankfully!) all done, I get to place these 700+ pages into a big box and mail them off to my agent in NYC.
Meanwhile, I work on my manuscript for 8-10 hrs every day, so progress is being made on the book itself. I don’t anticipate it being fully done until the end of the year, though…
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. Routine, order and predictability shelter him from the messy, wider world. Then, at fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing.
Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favorite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. As he tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, we are drawn into the workings of Christopher’s mind.
And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curse and blessing is a mind that perceives the world literally.
The Guards
Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana-The Guards, Ireland’s police force-and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober moments Jack aspires to become Ireland’s best private investigator, not to mention it’s first-Irish history, full of betrayal and espionage, discourages any profession so closely related to informing. But in truth Jack is teetering on the brink of his life’s sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects for the future nonexistent.
Nonexistent, that is, until a dazzling woman walks into the bar with a strange request and a rumor about Jack’s talent for finding things. Odds are he won’t be able to climb off his barstool long enough to get involved with his radiant new client, but when he surprises himself by getting hired, Jack has little idea of what he’s getting into.
Stark, violent, sharp, and funny, The Guards is an exceptional novel, one that leaves you stunned and breathless, flipping back to the beginning in a mad dash to find Jack Taylor and enter his world all over again. It’s an unforgettable story that’s gritty, absorbing, and saturated with the rough-edged rhythms of the Galway streets. Praised by authors and critics around the globe, The Guards heralds the arrival of an essential new novelist in contemporary crime fiction.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (”women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.
With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.
No Country for Old Men
“Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?” A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down’s syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by David Henry’s fateful decision that long-ago winter night.
A rich and deeply moving page-turner, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter captures the way life takes unexpected turns and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.
Grammar for the Rest of You
I’ll have to admit I’m a bit of a grammar geek. I usually refer to myself as a word nerd. I’m a professional editor as well as being a writer, so words, and the correct usage of words, are my business.
Because I’m more than a little obsessed with all things wordy, I can’t resist reading books about grammar and usage. I came across a fun one yesterday that even those who aren’t word nerds will enjoy: Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies by June Casagrande (Penguin, 224 pages, $14).
Casagrande, author of the “A Word, Please” column that appears in several community sections of the Los Angeles Times, offers a guide to usage that’s mostly based on doing what feels (or at least sounds) right. She’s not big on rules, and she is big on cheesy mnemonic devices to help you remember the rules you do need to know.
She hopes that people can learn to strike a balance between being clueless about grammar and being a “grammar snob,” someone who delights in his or her knowledge of grammar and will use that knowledge to humiliate others who do not know as much.
If you haven’t had the pain of running into a grammar snob, Casagrande elaborates:
Unlike normal people who get giddy about things like love, sex, money, free beer, and classic REO Speedwagon, these guys have the hots for things like punctuation marks and syntax rules and the excavation of lost words that were lost for a reason.
Like a lot of ‘happy’ drunks, these people can turn on you in an instant, transforming from Jekyll-like, playful nerds into bloodthristy grammar Hydes.
Some grammar snobs, Casagrande points out, give truth to the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They think they know the rules, so they think they have license to correct what they see as gaffes in other people’s writing and speaking.
But the truth is, these people often don’t know the rules any better than the average person. Or they know rules that are no longer considered rules, like the “rules” against splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions or starting them with conjunctions, all of which this book trashes, once and for all (we hope).
Casagrande also tackles more ticklish subjects like use of the subjunctive (was vs. were), saying “literally” when you mean “figuratively,” how to punctuate and why, and why rock stars can’t spell and what to do about it.
This entertaining and funny book is also educational if you don’t already know the basics of grammar and usage or are always getting rules confused. If you’re a grammar geek already, you might not learn much from this little book, but you should take it as a warning never to become one of the grammar snobs Casagrande takes to task, even if you think you really do know it all.