Those pesky blue packages

A friend was kind enough to hook me up with some fabulous ARCs (advanced reading copies) today. He also gave me a blue package, tied with a white ribbon, and a note that said: this book will make you cry.

What did I find?

The new Charles Martin book and TISSUES. Tissues with a book. In addition, the tissue package had a printed picture of the sappy river photo from the book cover on it. PLUS! For all the women in need of masculine beauty out there...the package FEATURED a special postcard-size picture of Mr. Martin himself, looking caring and 'sexy' next to a barn door.

Story v. Novel

Folks have been talking a lot lately about the decline of the short story. I think they mean the decline of the short story's readership because short stories seem to be alive and well - fat and happy even. Literary journals are still printing. Kenyon just started an online journal, didn't they? Oh, and Jumpa Lahiri, current mistress of the short story, recently published another short story collection.

Antonya Nelson wrote a nice, succinct, and highly likely explanation for the paradoxical situation of the short story in the market place. Paradoxical situation: the Average Reader wants everything fast - food, weight loss, money, happiness -but they want to read long, big books.

Riddle me that, eh? Nelson's explanation makes sense to me.

Alice Hoffman's The Third Angel

In her 18th novel, Alice Hoffman weaves the lives of three women together around a grimy, haunted London Hotel. Maddy, Frieda, and Lucy all realize something important while in this dreary hotel. The novel largely contemplates the power and necessity of empathy. In short, quick prose, Hoffman creates a bevy characters, whose actions indicate how close people can be to one another. The title comes from an idea that the third angel, not the angel of death or life, but the angel of, something like, kindness walks with all of us. Essentially, the third angel is the power of human caring, the ability we all have to help each other, altruistically, because we are in a position to help. Hoffman's invocation of the third angel in the story works best in the last tale about Lucy, in which Lucy learns a powerful lesson about love and family from a stranger whose heart has been stolen from him.

The premise is heartwrenching, but the grand, nostalgic nature of the plot and the emotional ailments of the characters do not come through as clearly as they should. The prose is clipped, sparse, as if it's too sclerotic to handle a heavy dose of human emotion.

I heart Joshilyn Jackson's blog

I was meandering around the bookweb, minding my business, when I came upon A Good Blog is Hard to Find, which cracked me up because I love that Flannery O'Connor story, though her title has man instead of blog. On this blog, I happened onto Joshilyn Jackson's blog, and my horrendous no good very rotten day just got a little brighter. I decided I had to start at blog entry the first, so I scrolled back to 2004 and started at the very begining, which, after all, is a very good place to start. I sort of feel like I'm obsessively stalking her, but, hey, she's got it out there for public consumption.

Just because you can, should you?

"Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling." - The New York Times: You're a Writer? Me, Too!