There is generally never a time I don’t want to be in Paris, but my friend Caro Llewellyn and the former NYPL President Paul LeClerc are making it especially difficult to not be there this year on September 20th – 24th. They’ve organized the first Festival des Écrivains du Monde with over 30 writers speaking in Paris and Lyon – You can see information here.

Copyright Moyan Brenn

Salman Rushdie at the Louvre, Edmund White at Maison de la Poésie, Coffee with Catherine Millet in the garden at the Musée Eugène Delacroix, Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje, Deborah Eisenberg, and much more – I want to go to every event.

It is patently impossible to attend an evening of storytelling with The Moth and walk away unchanged. Nathan Englander wrote a love letter to The Moth in The New Yorker‘s Page Turner blog that I’ve recently gone back and re-read – it’s here. Nathan sums up The Moth experience perfectly. You go, you get hooked – whether you’re in the audience or a storyteller. Nathan says The Moth is “basically the storytelling version of the high-diving board…I’ve spent hours and hours with the Moth, listening to stories, retelling them to anyone who will listen, taking them apart in my head. I’ve been writing stories for most of my life, and there’s something about the Moth that serves me, personally, and serves my work. Each time I listen to a story told aloud, and feel that direct connection with the teller, I am reminded of what a story, well told, can do.”

The Moth has their first book coming out September 3 – THE MOTH: 50 True Stories – and I am over the moon to be helping them with publicity. The book collects 50 great Moth stories from well-known writers such as Sebastian Junger, Andrew Solomon, and the aforementioned genius, Nathan Englander, to an astronaut floating in space realizing he’s not alone, to the White House Press Secretary who overslept and missed his flight on Air Force One, to a man who broke his wife out of hospice to give her one last ride on his Harley.

You can read a couple sample stories by Ed Gavagan and Janna Levin at the fabulous new website for the book: here.  And if you’re new to The Moth and do nothing besides read these two sample stories – I know it like it’s already done! – you will be hooked on The Moth too.

Pre-order The Moth book here.

Peter Orner has a brilliant piece on The Millions: Under All This Noise: On Reclusion, Writing, and Social Media that I think is valuable for any writer, (or for any reader for that matter). We talk so much (so much! too much!) these days about social media – twitter, Facebook, tumblr – but less and less about what is actually in a book.  A writer tells Peter that if he doesn’t personally reach out to readers via social media, “he is DOA.”  Peter finds this alarming for many reasons and writes, “For me, the whole point of fiction has always been to forget about me.”

It seems we are talking more about who a writer is, than what a writer writes. Do we really need to know a writer to appreciate his or her writing?

You can read Peter’s essay here.  It was posted a couple weeks ago, and I still find myself thinking about it every day.

The Atlantic posted a breathtakingly great, wholly inspiring piece by (my client) Peter Orner yesterday called “The Way Vivid, Way Underappreciated Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.” Peter talks about the first story of Gallant’s that he read and says, “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it changed my reading life forever.”

Mavis Gallant is 90, living in Paris, and if you’ve read her, you know this: She is one of the finest short story writers of our time. After reading Peter’s piece, I dug up my copy of The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, (all 887 pages of it), and re-read “In Plain Sight.”

Here’s how the story begins:
On the first Wednesday of every month, sharp at noon, an air-raid siren wails across Paris, startling pigeons and lending an edge to the mid-day news. Older Parisians say it has the tone and pitch of a newsreel soundtrack. They think, Before the war, and remember things in black-and-white.

I’m always bewildered by readers who proudly say they “don’t like short stories.” What they are missing! Peter has said, “The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between a pang in your heart and the tragedy of your whole life. Read a great story and there it is – right now – in your gut.”

And there it is in just the first few lines of a Mavis Gallant story. A trip to Paris, on a certain day at a certain time. People who don’t like short stories: What are we going to do with you.

Buy Mavis Gallant books here.

Pre-order Peter Orner’s new story collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, here.

The brilliant book jacket design gurus at Random House, Knopf and Crown talk about how they come up with the perfect cover in this cool short video.

The annual Housing Works Open Air Street Fair is on Sunday, June 2 from 10am to 4pm.

This festive, all-day shopping bazaar takes place on the quaint cobblestone Crosby Street outside of the Bookstore Cafe. Thousands of donated books, records, and CDs will be sold for $1 apiece; summery clothing, shoes and accessories will be available at Housing Works Soho Thrift Shop; great snacks from the Housing Works Cafe and local food purveyors Coolhaus, Mexicue, Luke’s Lobster and Cemitas and live music curated by Two Boots pizza, our Americana Jamboree partners.

With live music from:

Cleek Schrey
The Whiskey Hickon Boys
Rad Trad
Odetta Hartman and the Jamboree All-Stars

Not to be missed! Housing Works Bookstore is located at 126 Crosby St (between Houston and Prince) in NYC.

Glynnis MacNicol and Rachel Sklar have just started sending out TheLi.st Newsletter.
TheLi.st is a hub for women in technology or, as Glynnis and Rachel call it, “a visibility platform for awesome.”

They have a magnificent ability to point me towards news I might’ve missed but also to funnel news I’m particularly interested in. From must-read stories about climate change and the Yahoo/Tumblr deal to a story about Christine Quinn’s grandmother who was on the Titanic (in steerage, and survived) to one on creepy kids on Reddit – I’m just flat out fascinated by everything these two are talking about. Sign up for the three times a week newsletter here.

PS – A fun/startling thing TheLi.st pointed me toward: Ask Siri “how many planes are flying over my head right now.” (Go on, try it.)

Every author should treat their career like a business, and a good business needs a good website. Bud Parr of Sonnet Media recently designed an excellent site for one of my clients, David Berg and his forthcoming memoir, RUN BROTHER RUN. Take a look: here.

Bud is a pleasure to work with and has a history of designing sites for writers, agents and publishers that are clean, smart, easy to navigate and compelling. A good site doesn’t need bells and whistles or an overload of information – it should convey, quickly!, what you and your books are about, and get people to want to buy what you’re selling.
Right?
Right!
Check out other sites Bud has designed: here. And contact him here.
I recommend, heartily!

PS – David Berg’s Run, Brother, Run: A Memoir of a Murder in My Family goes on sale June 11. Pre-order it on his site!

One of the best parts of my job is talking with critics I admire about books I love. Getting to know these critics, understanding their interests, seeing what they make of projects I’m working on, is always enlightening, even when we disagree. These critics bring the weight of their training, education, reading, intelligence to the conversation – whether we agree or not isn’t the point. Their job is to elevate the cultural conversation.

Over the years, with the rise of online commenting, the cultural conversation about books has gotten so noisy and lite it’s difficult to figure out whose opinion is valuable. The best way to find a book to read, and in my opinion the only sure-fire way, is when someone you trust recommends it to you. So I read with extreme interest Tom Vanderbilt‘s essay in the Wilson Quarterly’s Spring Issue — Star Wars: Online Review Culture is Dotted with Black Holes of Bad Taste.
From Yelp to Netflix to Amazon, Vanderbilt considers online reviewers and what influences us to decide. He says “our choices in pre-Internet days were informed either by friends we trusted or critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly, the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust.” He quotes Daniel Mendelsohn who says most online reviewing “isn’t criticism proper” – it’s full of heat…but lacks light.” You can read Tom’s essay here. Whether you agree with Tom, or Daniel, or me, doesn’t matter – what is important is to consider who is recommending what and why, and to continue to have the conversation.

I’ll be honest: As a publicist, I didn’t like Goodreads. A good publicist is a control freak and I couldn’t control Goodreads. Over the years, authors would call me when a negative comment about their book was posted by a reader and ask “What can we DO about this?!” And there was, in most cases, nothing we could do. It’s the bane of being published: Other people will have opinions about your book and you might not agree with them. Goodreads collected those opinions. Sure some of those reviews were posted by author’s friends, or even by authors themselves, but mostly those reviews were neutral and posted by involved readers who were moved enough by a book that they took the time to comment.

When I remembered to check it, Goodreads let me know if readers were marking books I was working on as “to be read.” And I liked, certainly, seeing thoughtful readers weighing-in early with positive comments. But as a publicist, as well as a reader, I count on independent booksellers and professional critics to steer opinion. People might take issue with that, but it is what it is. I took Goodreads reviews with a grain of salt.

And with this week’s news that Amazon has bought Goodreads, I deleted my account. There are a ton of articles out there about the pros and cons of the Goodreads deal, but I agree with every word of this blog post, by John Eklund a University Press sales rep (who I don’t know). It’s well worth reading, especially when he says, “I can’t think of anything nastier right now in the book world than the prospect of this behemoth acquiring even more intimate knowledge of my buying habits than it already has. Enough is enough.”

Pretty soon, this publishing industry news will be topped by something else and we’ll turn our attention to that. But for now, and if for nothing else, the Goodreads acquisition is another reminder that one of the best, most reliable sources for figuring out what to read is available by heading over to your local independent bookstore and talking with real, live people.