PowellsBooks.Blog

There's a bench in Cully, Switzerland. It's in a little park tucked up against the shore of Lake Geneva. I go there a lot to just sit and think, or not think. I've been doing it for 13 years. I'm sitting on that bench now, writing these words.

First time I came here... Christ, it was a long time ago... spring, 2001. I was still a news cameraman for ITN (the Brit independent TV network) and had been working the Intifada for eight months straight. I'd already seen hundreds of people shot dead or blown apart.

I'd already been hit once and nearly killed twice. I'd been targeted by both Israeli and Palestinian snipers. One shot nearly tore off my leg; another shot almost took off my head. A centimeter either way, I'd be dead.

Then there was the night I was having dinner in Jerusalem and the street blew up (Palestinian suicide bomber). Then there was the night in Bethlehem when another street blew up (Israeli missile strike).

Then there was the night a suicide bomber walked into a bar. He had a bomb ...

Whatever one thinks of Twitter, the Friday Reads hashtag is kind of a cool tradition. Take some of your favorite books by people you know, hashtag #fridayreads, and link directly to the book at your favorite local independent bookstore.

It looks something like this:

#fridayreads Loving #AVeryMinorProphet by @jamesbfrost. Tall bikes, zines, hipster love! Get it at @powells: http://bit.ly/JNfz8L

In honor of that tradition, here’s a list of some of my friends and their books. It's hard to write a book, so love and respect to all you.

(Oh and though he's not a personal friend, go to Powell's tonight and see Matt Love present his new book Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel. Love a guy dedicated to preserving Oregon's history.

In no particular order:

• Greg Robillard — Captain Freedom
• Laurel Hermanson — Soft Landing
• Kerry Cohen — Seeing Ezra
• Gigi Rosenberg —

It's been entertaining watching and listening to reviewers talk about Being Flynn, the movie being made from Nick Flynn's novel, which bears the expletive-laden title Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. You can hear annoyance in the reporter's voices, the fact that they're adults that have to tiptoe around Nick Flynn's title, "Ha ha, we can't say the actual title on the air, but we'll call it "Another B. S. Night in Bleep City," snicker, snicker.

As a writer, though, it does beg some questions: Is that discomfort worth it? Could I lose readers? And, since I'm not a six-figure-book-deal-level writer, do I risk losing an editor's attention with a couple of needless swear words?

For a number of years, I shared a writing group with the author Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck had brought in pages from his then in-progress novel Pygmy and read one of his classic, gut-wrenching, morally deprived scenes. (If memory serves correctly, this one involved the main character drugging the entire family of the ...

I love Dave Eggers. I hate Dave Eggers. If I could become any other living writer, I would answer faster than anyone else in the room, "Dave Eggers."

On the other hand, if I were to become Dave Eggers, I would immediately take Benzedrine, stop showering, write for seven days without cease, finish a novel, and then turn back into James Bernard Frost to edit it.

Let me try to explain this.

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program. I was taking an autobiography class, the first class that all students in this program take. The first thing my professor said to me after reading my work was, "You write just like Dave Eggers." The first thing I did after leaving class was to go to the bookstore and pick up a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I went home with the book, started reading it, and did not look up until I was done. It was the most startlingly energetic piece of writing I have ...

For everyone I know who is a writer, there was some awkward time in their lives when they had to learn to call themselves one. You'd make a few sales to the local newspaper... Did that make you a writer? Your friends who ran a small literary journal and published a story of yours... Did that make you a writer? You self-published a poetry chapbook... Were you a writer now? Even when bigger things happened — your first sale to a major magazine, a book deal with a small press — you still weren't comfortable with the words I'm a writer.

I had just turned 28 and sold my first book, a travel guide for vegetarians , but I'd tell people about the day job that I didn't care about instead — I placed banner advertisements on the web for a search engine company. And when I quit my job in order to finish the book, I'd tell people that I was unemployed, or even, with a chuckle, that I'd retired. But never that I was a writer. It sounded fake or pretentious to say it.

Once ...

This isn't the best day to begin my stint as guest blogger at Powell's. After last night's binge — Xanax, a few IPAs, numerous cans of PBR, a jar of something alcoholic called Ginger Love, and several progressively stronger borrowed cigarettes (I don't normally smoke) — the writing promises to be foggy. But as they say in show biz (see, my writing brain isn't functional, so I'm going with cliché), the show must go on.

The reason for this binge drinking was that last night was the culmination of my book tour, and, to celebrate it, I put on an event at Dante's Inferno called Literary Gong Show. I was the host of the event and had dressed myself in a tuxedo and a floppy-collared, bright-yellow, pleated tuxedo shirt that I unbuttoned to the navel. This was intended as an impersonation of Chuck Barris, the '70s TV host who hosted the actual Gong Show, but I think I just looked like an aging writer in a cheap, untailored tuxedo who didn't know to button his shirt and couldn't afford a bow tie.

The Gong Show event was the end ...

[Editor's note: Please join us at our Burnside location tonight at 7:30, where Lois Leveen will be presenting her new novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Click here for full event information.]

Wayyyyy back in October, I found out my novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser would be published on May 15. But it was only a couple of weeks ago that I began to wonder what I would actually do on May 15. And, for that matter, on May 14, and on May 16. I had no idea. So I asked some of my friends who are published authors.

Heidi Durrow (author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) told me that the day her book came out, she had a "gussy me up day": she got her hair done, and also her nails and toes, to be ready for her book launch party. But then she panicked that no one would show up. Ten minutes before the reading, only a dozen people ...

Fear of a red tractor. That is what keeps a novelist up at night.

Remember the good ol' days when barber, surgeon, and dentist was a single occupation?

Okay, maybe those days weren't so good. But at least back then, the dentist was probably too busy to be a literary critic, too. My dentist, however, is another matter.

Last year, while giving my molars the once over, the dear old DMD told me about a book he'd been reading. A book he really liked. Until he got to a description of "a red John Deere tractor" sitting in a field. He immediately put the book down, never to finish it. Because, as he put it, "everyone knows, John Deere has never made a red tractor. That was put in there by some New York editor."

Only a West Coast dentist can make a New York editor sound like such an unseemly villain.

Authors — and our editors — are always trying to add specificity to our descriptions, to make things more real. Except that when you get that "real" detail wrong, you have blown ...

"We're giving you a French flap," my publisher said.

"That's fantastic!" I said.

Then I immediately Googled "French flap."

Which it turns out is not, as I feared, some new variant on a Brazilian wax.

A French flap is a fancy-pants design in which the cover includes an extra folded bit on each side, which gives the publisher more room to tell you about the book, and gives you a built-in bookmark to fold into place. (Unless of course you decide to read the book in one sitting, in which case, I'm sure you can find some creative use for your flap page).

The French flap says, exquisite physical object. But, being bilingual, it also says pas trop cher. A French-flapped tome is not only elegant, it's less expensive, less heavy to schlep around, and less of a space-hog on your bookshelf than a hardback.

Yes, I said it. My book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is not coming out in hardback. This is the kind of news that until not long ago ...

To an author, librarians are superheroes. First, they are incredible sources when we are researching and writing. Then, they are vital connectors for helping readers find our finished books. And if librarians in general are superheroes, Nancy Pearl is the superduperhero, the librarian so cool she has her own action figure. So when Nancy Pearl defines the four elements that make a person fall in love with a book, who wouldn't listen?

Story. Character. Setting. Language. Pearl calls these four elements doorways , "because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book." And since books take us places, I figure we might as well carry Pearl's four-door metaphor into sedan-land. That way, I can hotwire it and take it for a blog-entry spin.

Here's what Pearl means by her four doors:

A book heavy on story is a page-turner, and we fall headlong into its can't-wait-to-find-out-what-happens-nextness. What in graduate school I was taught to call narrative desire and what in ...