SXSW coverage
Home > The M.O. > Archives > Books category
Books
December 9, 2009
R. Kelly to release his memoirs
There is good news. (The Longhorns are playing for the national championship.) There is great news.. (I found $20 in my jeans this morning.) And there is amazing, no-way-that-can’t-be-true news. (R. Kelly is releasing his memoirs.)
After two decades of providing the world with some decent music, some shocking scandal and an earth-shattering serial drama/operetta, R. Kelly is prepared to share his story.
Publisher SmileyBooks announced today that three-time Grammy Award winner Kelly (born Robert Sylvester Kelly) will have his story out on shelves by early 2011.
“We are thrilled to be the conduit through which R. Kelly will tell his own story,” said Tavis Smiley, founder and publisher of SmileyBooks. “He has earned the right to tell his story his own way.”How, exactly, he earned it is unclear. What is also unclear is how many people will be willing to put more money in the pocket of someone who has been at the center of some tawdry scandals. Speaking of, apparently Kelly will address his six-year imbroglio surrounding child pornography charges.
“I’m writing this book as Robert, not R. Kelly,” Kelly said. “I’m tired of being misunderstood. I will show you the tears, fears, and sweat. I will open my heart and reveal the good in my life as well as all the drama. I want to tell it like it is.”
God, please let Kelly read/sing the audio book version.
The memoir is still untitled, in case you were wondering. But I think “Trapped in the Closet: The Memoir” sounds pretty good. Or, “I Believe I Can Write.” “I Wanna Read To You”?
As Terrell Owens would say, “Get your popcorn ready.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Books
October 20, 2009
Austin Makes a Book
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Books
June 19, 2009
David Sedaris in San Marcos Friday night
Humorist and author David Sedaris may be dressed up in denim this weekend, as he will be visiting Hastings in San Marcos. You read that correctly. Sedaris in San Marcos.
The New York Times bestselling author has a massive following in Austin, as evidenced by his sold-out shows and the long snaking lines present at each of his book-singing appearances here. Apparently his fame stretches down the IH-35 corridor, as he is scheduled to be in both San Marcos and San Antonio this weekend.
Considering how difficult it can be to see Sedaris in Austin, it may be worth your time to head down the road to catch him in San Marcos.
Sedaris is touring in support of the recent paperback release of “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.”
David Sedaris reading and book signing
Hastings
Friday, June 19
6 p.m.
917 S. Highway 80 [map]
Watch Sedaris’ recent appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Books
December 2, 2008
You may want to think twice before ordering books from Amazon.com
‘Tis the season to find a way to not spend a lot on holiday gifts. You know, recession and all. While it’s always nice to get something personal for your friend/family/loved one, sometimes the easiest and best gift is a book. Fortunately, we are blessed with the presence of BookPeople, and Half-Priced Books for that matter (but you can really only go used book for a younger sibling), but many people still prefer to order their books online. The behemoth of the online book selling world is obviously Amazon.com, but if you plan on ordering from said online purveyor this year, you may want to read this first.
From the Village Books (in über-heady Bellingham, Wash.) blog:
With this being the beginning of Buy Local Week here in Bellingham I thought it appropriate that I post a response I sent to a very good question from one of our customers. He had just received our holiday catalog and was curious why the prices on some of our books were considerably higher than those of online retailer, Amazon. Here is the answer I sent to him. I’d love to have your comments.
Thanks for your note and the chance to let you know a bit about book pricing. The publisher sets the suggested retail price of a book and bookstores and other resellers buy the books for a discount off of that price. Our discount is in the range of 40 - 45% off the retail price. Regular discounts that we give, such as our frequent buyer program, school discounts, our birthday card discounts, etc. pare that margin down to below 40%. The costs of operating a bricks-and-mortar retail establishment—occupancy, personnel, etc. eat up most of what remains. In the most profitable days of retail bookstores bottom-line profits were about 2%. Stores have struggled for several years to get back to that point in spite of low compensation (including that of owners—Dee and I make less than we would if we had stayed in education) and controlling every possible expense.Amazon and other online retailers have created a very low-cost delivery system, though it’s still unclear whether they really make money on the book part of their business, given all of the other products they sell. We simply cannot compete with those vendors on price. What we believe we do deliver is a contribution to the quality of life in the community that remote mail order businesses cannot and will not provide. Each reader will make his or her choice on the basis of what is most important to them. Retail bookstores may well be the buggy whip stores of a previous century. In 1992, when I was president of the American Booksellers Association there were about 4500 independent bookstores. Today there are fewer than 1500.
Village Books has had a good run, coming up on thirty years. It may be that “the times they are a changing.” And, we too, may go the way of the dodo bird and dinosaur. But, it’s not going to happen soon. Many folks understand the difference between price (what one pays for an item) and true cost (what one gets and/or sacrifices for it). Many believe that what we, and other independent businesses, contribute to the life of the community makes the cost of buying from us lower than buying from Amazon or WalMart or…
We hope you see the value of what we, and other independent businesses, contribute to the quality of life in our community. We truly appreciate your business and will continue to strive to provide great value. Thanks again for your note.
Point being: buy local this holiday season. It may cost a couple of bucks more, but come on, you’re buying books as gifts, you can at least do it with a clean conscience, you cheapskates. (Thanks to Ingrid for the tip.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Books
October 30, 2008
David Lynch to produce Webisode with Austin company
Who knows if it was his trip here last year to promote his new book, “Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity,” last year and appear on “Texas Monthly Talks,” but it appears enigmatic filmmaker, author and artist David Lynch must have taken a liking to Austin. According to reelpopblog.com, “Jen Gregono, chief content officer at [Austin-based] On Networks, let slip during a panel discussion [at the OMMA Video Conference] that her company recently signed mad-genius director David Lynch to a webisode series based on his mad-genius new book ‘Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity’.”
Should be fascinating. Check out my write-up from Lynch’s taping for “Texas Monthly Talks” last year in which he discussed the book, filmmaking, his creative process and more.
(Thanks to SXSW News Reel for the tip.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Books
October 27, 2008
Sarah Vowell's 'Wordy Shipmates': Learned, funny
People have wielded the term “Puritan” as a pejorative for years. If you’ve ever tried to accuse someone of being straight-laced and sexually cloistered, chances are you’ve resorted, without thinking twice, to the P word.
In her pop history “The Wordy Shipmates,” Sarah Vowell wants to inspire you to think again. “I’m always disappointed when I see the word ‘Puritan’ tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys,” she writes. “Because, to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
Despite the prevalent stereotype that they were stodgy, simplistic moralists, the Puritans were an intriguing and, at times, contradictory lot. These brave pioneers suppressed radical individual thought yet represented the first golden age of America, reading and writing with a voraciousness that would put most of us to shame. They annihilated native cultures in their dogged mission to the New World while trumpeting the virtues of idealized communal living. And they were rather passionate about sex … as long as it was between two people bound by a marriage contract.
From her first book, 1997’s “Radio On,” a critical diary of American radio (on which she has since become a major player, thanks to her work on public radio’s “This American Life”), to 2005’s “Assassination Vacation,” which detailed a road trip she took to excavate the history of presidential assassinations, Vowell has proven herself to be a thoughtful and sarcastic writer who struggles openly with the glory and shame of American cultural and political history, not to mention its present state.
In “The Wordy Shipmates,” she spotlights not the Separatist Pilgrims who rode the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth — they of elementary school plays — but the Nonseparatist Pilgrims who left England 10 years later, in 1630, to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island.
The Puritans of Vowell’s work felt the Church of England had become almost indistinguishable from the Catholic church. But instead of berating the church and starting a full-fledged war (like the ones then raging in continental Europe), they humbly bowed their heads and gathered for a brutal journey to a new land in hope of purifying their parent church and starting anew.
Vowell admits that the differences between Separatists and Nonseparatists borders on nitpicking. She confesses that her interest in the latter comes from the fact that, unlike the Separatists, who abandoned the Church of England, the Nonseparatists hedged their bets.
“(I find their) qualms messier and more endearing,” Vowell writes. “They were leaving for the same reasons the Pilgrims left, but they had either the modesty to feel bad about it or the charitable hypocrisy to at least pretend to. Maybe it’s because I live in a world crawling with separatists that I find religious zealots with a tiny bit of wishy-washy, pussy-footing compromise in them deeply attractive.”
That passage shows Vowell at her best, finding humor and nuance in people and ideas that are often painted with broad strokes or ignored.
Beyond her love of their neuroticism, Vowell feels sympathy for the Puritans because she believes history has overlooked their thirst for knowledge, writing and reading — a passion seemingly shared by the author’s gang of public radio and McSweeney’s mates, although to entirely different ends. After forming the Massachussetts Bay Colony under the guidance of John Winthrop, the Puritans, whose pamphlets, speeches, sermons and letters serve as the primary source material for Vowell’s book, established Harvard in order to give their sons a place to “receive proper, orthodox theological education grounded in the rigors of studying Hebrew and Greek.”
Still, Vowell hardly whitewashes their history. “Certainly the Puritans believed and said and did many unreasonable things,” she writes. “That kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason.”
Vowell ably ties several of the ideas of 17th-century New England to many of our modern predicaments, namely the idea that the people of Massachusetts Bay intended to help the American Indians much in the same way that the Bush administration has attempted to spread democracy in the Middle East. Additionally, we see how history repeats itself, sometimes perversely, when Winthrop’s claim that the Puritans were establishing a “city on a hill” in America popped up in the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
“(Kennedy) boils down the two phrases from ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ that mean the most to him: ‘We must always consider, (Winthrop) said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,’ ” Vowell writes.
“I fall for those words every time I hear them, even though they’re dangerous, even though they’re arrogant, even though they’re rude,” she continues. “(Kennedy) does not mention that the whole world is staring in America’s direction because we have a lot of giant scary bombs, but I am guessing that is partly what he meant.” It’s a tribute to Vowell’s open-mindedness that she can regard such historical ironies as at once chilling and seductive.
The book’s only weakness is its nonlinear structure, which ultimately undermines its coherence. Unlike her previous three books, “The Wordy Shipmates” isn’t broken into vignettes or individual stories. Instead, Vowell tries to weave a complex narrative that begins on the coast of England in 1630 and ends in modern America. The constant back and forth between the 17th and 21st centuries can be dizzying.
Thankfully, the bits and pieces that make up “The Wordy Shipmates” are engaging and informative. Unlike the Puritans, Vowell is no judgmental killjoy. But like them, she is never boring or stupid.
Sarah Vowell at BookPeople
Tuesday, October 28
7 p.m.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Books
