In response to my recent posts about the decline of big publishing, Slog tipper Clinton argues:

"Well, if this is all they can come up with...."

If you don't want to follow the link, the "this" links to a book published by HarperCollins on November 25th of this year called How to Talk to Girls, by Alec Greven. This is how HarperCollins describes the book:

Are you smart enough to take over a girl's heart?

Leave it to a nine-year-old to get down to the basics about how to win victory with a girl. how to talk to girls is for boys of all ages—from eight to eighty—and the girls they like. So read this book and then you're ready. Good luck!

Tips:

Comb your hair and don't wear sweats
Control your hyperness (cut down on the sugar if you have to)
Don't act desperate

It's a relationship advice book written by a child. On second thought, let the big publishers die. Let them all die.

Did you know that December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month? Welcome White Folks says it is, and what the hell, I'll believe them.

Oh, one other thing, white people already know about Toni Morrison, so please choose something else besides A Mercy.

The books I'm buying to give to white friends this year include:

Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate
Kinky Gazpacho by Lori Tharps
Going Down South by Bonnie Glover
No Place Safe by Kim Reid
Seen it All and Done the Rest by Pearl Cleage

A couple years ago, while at Book Expo America. I noted the segregation of black titles:

There are a number of panels, as well, that are not independent-bookseller centric—for instance, a discussion, sponsored by the stellar new magazine A Public Space, about the future of short fiction, and a seminar titled "Their Eyes Were Reading Smut: The Impact of Ghetto Fiction on African-American Literature." As the only white man in the room, I find the latter to be especially interesting: Literature is one of the most ghettoized art forms in America today, and current African-American lit, to hear the panelists tell it, is mostly about either gangs and violence or hot-sex romance, most notably written by an author named Zane. An author on the panel points out that it's possible to include sex without making your novel a porno; by way of example: "I'm sure lots of you have read Po Man's Child or Howard Street," and these two titles set nearly every head in the room to nodding. I've never heard of them, and I'm sure that 95 percent of other white bookstore employees haven't heard of them either. The panelist, whose name I never catch, goes on: "Books are the freest media we have—it's the only media where we're not advertising drivel." These wind up being perhaps the most honorable words I hear all weekend.

Even the most avid of white readers could probably stand to brush up on their African-American-written fiction. I'm not a fan of African-American Fiction sections in bookstores—besides the segregation aspect, I'm usually for less subcategories in bookstores to increase the chances of miraculous non sequitur finds while browsing—but I do think blogs like Welcome White People should keep recommending good books by black authors to non-black readers, because we're sure not finding them on our own.

(Via MOBYLIVES.)

Colson Whitehead, who I will always take an opportunity to gush about, is getting ready to release a new novel called Sag Harbor. It's going to be his most autobiographical novel to date. He read a piece of it earlier this year at Seattle Arts & Lectures, which I reported on here.

Here is video of him talking about Sag Harbor and Sag Harbor.

I love him so much I might have to recuse myself from reviewing his next book for fear of humping it to death.

(Via Black Garterbelt.)

When I was a teenager, I was both a book nerd and a comic book geek. And so I loved the Wild Cards series, which was a series of sci-fi novels about an alien virus that kills 90% of the people it comes in contact with, turns most of the rest into monsters, and gives the rest super powers.

The Wild Card books are now 21 years old, and Bookgasm discusses the Wild Cards series today. The newest is a book called Busted Flush, and it sounds as though, like many sci-fi series, things have gotten too complex and impenetrable for their own good:

But as entertaining as it is, BUSTED FLUSH is not for the uninitiated. Those already familiar with past exploits of the aces and jokers will have an easier time keeping up with the numerous characters and events. Everyone else might want to first read INSIDE STRAIGHT or some of the background essays provided on the series website before taking on the latest addition to this unique but intricate series.

Sci-fi writers seem to forget that there's a way to write a series so that people can jump in partway through. Lots of writers—and George R. R. Martin, the Wild Cards editor, is a huge problem in this regard with his own fantasy series—make their books incredibly dense, so that there's no way to get into things without going back to the very beginning. That's not how you get people into a series of books: You get them hooked on the new one and then they go back and buy all the old stuff, if they're interested. I could totally see myself picking up up a Wild Cards book to read over a weekend sometime, just out of nostalgia, but the idea of all these decades of history that I've missed building into something I can't keep track of is probably enough to turn me off from that idea. Which is kind of a bummer. I could use some good escapist sci-fi right about now.

Wow. When I reported on Random House yesterday, it turns out I was missing a lot of the story. It seems as though every publisher on earth cut people yesterday:

The New York publishing world, which has had its own shivers of layoffs, got seriously rattled by major announcements today by Random House, Simon & Schuster and Thomas Nelson. Publishers Weekly editor Sarah Nelson is not the only one calling it Black Wednesday.

Thomas Nelson is a Christian publisher. They cut 54 people. Harper Collins and Penguin have both announced salary freezes. All this is due to exceedingly low bookstore sales. It's enough to make you wonder who's going to be around in publishing in six months.