I came across Seth Marko’s post, which I thought must’ve been some sort of mistake. But no, it’s not. Says the Philadelphia Free Library,
We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood branch libraries, regional libraries, or the Parkway Central Library after October 2, 2009.
- All branch and regional library programs, including programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults, will be cancelled
- All Parkway Central Library programs, including children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs, will be cancelled. We are exploring the possibility of relocating the Philadelphia Author Series programs to other non-library facilities.
- All library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers will cease.
- All community meetings at our branch and regional libraries, and the Parkway Central Library, will be cancelled.
- All GED, ABE and ESL programs held at Free Library branches will be discontinued, students should contact their teacher to see if other arrangements are being made.
on his blog
Some time ago I mistakenly let the cat out of the bag too early, but as of today it’s official: The Tourist has been nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award!
Since I’ve known about it for some weeks now, I’ve been both thrilled and anxious about…well, my competition. So today I finally got to see who I’m up against. Here’s the full list:
Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict (Orion)
Gillian Flynn: Dark Places (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
John Hart: The Last Child (John Murray)
Charlie Newton: Calumet City (Bantam Press)
Daniel Silva: Moscow Rules (Michael Joseph)
Olen Steinhauer: The Tourist (HarperCollins)
Andrew Williams: The Interrogator (John Murray)
toughThe Touristlist of all the Dagger noms heretelevised
can be found here
I wanted to drop in to apologize for the lack of posts from me here (except one I deleted—I apparently let a secret out before its time). The family and I spent a lovely couple weeks on the Croatian island of Hvar, our first “proper” vacation (meaning: one that had nothing to do with work) for a long time. As luck had it, though, the second week was invaded by illness, which democratically spread to us all, giving us hefty doses of fever that we brought back home to us. Oh, well.
During this time, and since, I’ve been editing the still-untitled follow-up to The Tourist. Various titles have arisen, such as:
Eulogies
The Mole
The Means
Crashing the Same Car
Myrrh
and of course The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
matter
Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManUlyssesFinnegans Wake
The Touristthatnext
At least, this is how I interpret the title of Mr. Liss’s latest, The Devil’s Company, which appears on bookstore shelves, virtual and real, today. I can only assume from the title that it’s about a dotcom startup headed by Satan himself.
As he points out at his personal blog, TDC (wait a minute…that abbreviation looks familiar…) has already garnered praise from the smart and tasteful folks at The San Antonio Express News. Waste no time tracking it down, because The Devil’s Company…
…is more than just a finely written mystery. Liss injects thoughtful discussion of issues that should resonate in the best university business courses. Corporate ethics at the British East India Company appear to resemble those of Wall Street companies this decade…. Liss accomplishes this within an engaging, intelligent and entertaining narrative that also illuminates London’s 18th-century lifestyles and urban landscapes. The dialogue is sharply turned, and the humor is deliciously subtle.
another
Friend of the Nomad and Budapest resident (via England) Adam LeBor recently published his first novel, The Budapest Protocol, a conspiratorial thriller that nail-bitingly brings the Third Reich into present-day Euro-politics. Adam has an esteemed history in the nonfiction genre, with such titles as City of Oranges, Milosevic and Complicity with Evil. Now, as a thriller novelist, he’s even garnered a terrific review in The Irish Times. Begins Declan Burke:
IT WILL come as no surprise to some that the European Union is a fiendish Nazi plot, and that the euro is just one of the tools employed by the Fourth Reich to facilitate the flow of capital from one country to another. They may be disappointed to learn that this is the case only between the covers of Adam Lebor’s political thriller….
Read the rest
I recently received an email from the esteemed Otto Penzler, and he described a project he’d been trying to get off the ground for a few years now. It kept getting stalled for various reasons, but he was happy to say that it was back on track. Agents of Treachery: an anthology of espionage stories. He already had stories in hand from, among others:
Charles McCarry
Joseph Finder
Dan Fesperman
David Morrell
James Grady
Stephen Hunter
Lee Child
Robert Wilson
paid
The Miernik Dossier (which is, I have to say, an astoundingly good book), by the great Charles McCarry.
Now all I have to do is write a story that’ll measure up to these heavyweights. So far I’ve written three thousand words. Three times. Hopefully next time they’ll stick.
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”320” caption=”Picture of Leipzig ©2002 by James Martin”]
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Though I first learned this last year, I’ve kept mum until the official papers arrived verifying that I’d been granted a Guest Professorship at Leipzig University. That’s the Leipzig in Germany, with a university founded in 1409 no less, and it’s the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature in the university’s American Studies department. The papers arrived on Friday.
It’s a wonderful program which will give us four months (we’ll be there for the winter October-February semester) in a city known for its history, music, and art. If that sounds like a dry description of any of a hundred European cities, it is—but from what I can tell “dry” doesn’t apply to Leipzig at all. Check out this piece from Conde Nast Traveler.
And while today neo-Nazi rowdies plague much of the former German Democratic Republic, Leipzig seems a bulwark of the values of a democratic society. Three times a year, neo-Nazis arrive by train to march through town. “They never get farther than the railroad station,” Mark Hamilton, a Scottish artist and adopted Leipziger, assured me. Families come out and block the street, and what is peculiarly called “the radical Left”—a prominent faction among the city’s nearly forty thousand students—has been known to stand among them bearing American and Israeli flags.
Nowadays, Leipzig spends about $135 million a year on cultural affairs, the equivalent of what Frankfurt, a city with three times its 500,000 population, budgets. The person in charge of culture in this city is Georg Girardet, a Bavarian of Huguenot descent. Girardet is the deputy mayor for cultural affairs. No other German city has a deputy mayor specifically for culture, and the importance of the post is underlined by the fact that you have to run for office to get it. Girardet has been elected three times since he arrived in 1991.
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”252” caption=”“Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, Polish tobacco farmers near Windsor Locks, Connecticut” (Jack Delano, 1940)”]
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The article came out a week or two ago, but I forgot to mention it here. Over at Publishers Weekly is an interesting article on my esteemed publisher, called “Minotaur Moves Beyond Genre,” and it features Yours Truly.
But the article is interesting beyond my presence, as it shows the attempts by a major mystery imprint to redefine itself in the book world:
[Minotaur publisher Andrew] Martin’s goal is to drive home the message that Minotaur, while it is about genre fiction, is also about big fiction.
big
Noting that his outlook on publishing was changed by the years he spent working at Sterling, owned by Barnes & Noble, Martin has devised a schedule in which Minotaur publishes one big book a month that is backed by a major marketing push and a 75,000-copy to 200,000-copy first printing.
Liberation MovementsIstanbul Variations
The other route involves cherry-picking writers from Minotaur’s backlist (aka the farm team)—many of them accomplished genre authors the imprint has steadily done 5,000-copy print runs for. Olen Steinhauer is one such writer. Steinhauer’s The Tourist, published in March, is his sixth book, but the first in a new trilogy, which Martin said was key to giving the Edgar-winning author a higher profile. “[Steinhauer] had great literary chops,” Martin elaborated, “but I can’t make him great on book four or five of a five-book series.” (The Tourist, which has sold 51,000 copies to date, was also acquired for film by George Clooney.)
winnerthat
Check it out