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Jim Cox Report: October 2024
Dear Publisher Folk, Friends & Family:
I don't smoke, I don't drink, and at the age of 81 (82 next month), my wife still won't let me have a girlfriend -- in order to have a good time I have taken to roaming around on the internet in search of websites that would be of interest to writers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, dedicated hardcore bibliophiles, and the general reading public. Here are two such websites that I came across recently and thought I would share with you:
BookFinder.com
https://www.bookfinder.com/isbn_search
This is a thoroughly 'user friendly' resource for finding out the best prices available for books (especially textbooks) for students (and anyone else!) that includes not only purchase price comparisons, but 'sell back' prices as well. You just plug in the author., title, ISBN, the language you want it in, and the type of currency required. This specialized search engine also covers new and used classifications, such includes such features as 1st Edition, Signed, No POD, and even books No ISBN. It even keeps a history of your recent searches for you.
Writers & Publishers Network
https://writersandpublishersnetwork.com
The Writers & Publishers Network is the website of a national literary nonprofit whose mission is to provide education, information, resources, and a supportive networking environment for creative individuals and small business owners interested in the publishing process.
This is a treasure of a website resource for anyone who is personally or professional involved in or interested in publishing, whether they are an author, a freelance writer, an artist, or own a publishing company.
WPN encourages the exchange of ideas, information, and other mutual benefits, and operates this website for the purpose of sharing information on writing, marketing, and publishing. It also offers links to research sources, publishers, printers, the media, and other sources that might be important to writers and authors.
Here is a listing (and its an impressive one) of the WPN Affiliate Partners:
Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC)
Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA)
Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN)
Publishers Association of the West (PubWest)
Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA)
Christian Small Publishers Association (CSPA)
Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA)
Self-Publishers Online Conference attendees (SPOC)
Quote of the Month:
"Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river." -- Lisa Lee
Now on to book reviews of interest to writers, publishers and bibliophiles:
Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels
Debra Gettelman
Princeton University Press
https://press.princeton.edu
9780691260419, $99.95, HC, 240pp
https://www.amazon.com/Imagining-Otherwise-Readers-Nineteenth-Century-Novels/dp/0691260419
Synopsis: As the publication of novels exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience (sometimes grudgingly) that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. With the publication of "Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels", Professor Debra Gettelman shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.
Professor Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader’s independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction.
Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader’s capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Professor Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.
As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader’s imagination has become a determining element of today’s literary environment. "Imagining Otherwise" published by Princeton University Press takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.
Critique: While also available for personal reading lists in a paperback edition (9780691260426, $29.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $16.17), "Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels" is an inherently fascinating and thought-provoking read. A seminal work of ground-breaking scholarship that is informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of an Introduction (Imagining Readers), a ten page Bibliography, twenty pages of Notes, and a six page Index, "Imagining Otherwise" will prove of interest to students and non-specialist general readers with an interest in 19th Century/Victorian Era Literary Criticism and the literary impact reader's had on what novelists wrote. Simply stated, "Imagining Otherwise" by Professor Debra Gettelman is an original and unreservedly recommended addition to community and college/university library General Books/Reading collections and supplemental Victorian/19th Century Literary Criticism curriculum studies lists.
Editorial Note: Debra Gettelman is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross whose fields of study include: 19th Century British Literature and Culture; the Novel; Book History; and Film Adaptation.
Firsthand
Keith Gundal
University of Michigan Press
www.press.umich.edu
9780472076956, $65.00, HC, 300pp
https://www.amazon.com/Firsthand-Literary-Mystery-Learned-Disorder/dp/0472076957
Synopsis: "Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis while Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things" by CCNY creative writing professor Keith Gandal is an exploration (both suspenseful and comic) of the creative process in research writing.
"Firsthand" takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place.
Professor Gandal combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession (including at times himself) were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process.
Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, "Firsthand" gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge -- about the world, about history, and about oneself.
Critique: Of special relevance to readers with an interest in research writing, and descriptively insightful writers-on-writing biographies and memoirs, Professor Keith Gundal's "Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis while Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things" from the University of Michigan Press is an especially and unreservedly recommended pick for community and college/university library Author Memoir and Writing Reference collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists of students, academia, aspiring authors, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that that "Firsthand" is also readily available in a paperback edition (9780472056958, $24.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $23.70) as well.
Editorial Note: Keith Gandal (https://english.ccny.cuny.edu/keith-gandal/) is Professor of English with a Joint Appointment in American Studies and Creative Writing at The City College of New York.
How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing
Dan Beachy-Quick
University of Michigan Press
www.press.umich.edu
9780472039708, $24.95, PB, 176pp
https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Circle-Reading-Writing/dp/0472039709
Synopsis: What is it to write a poem? What work do words do when placed with care and vision into the intensely charged space of poetic effort?
"How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing" by Dn Beachy-Quick does not seek to answer those questions, but to encounter them as fully and honestly as one can. The thread running through the essays is an ongoing investigation into poetry as an epistemological experiment, one which binds the imagination to the worldly, and trusts that creative endeavor is a form of participation in the ongoing creation of the world.
It does so in part by focusing on thinkers, poets, writers, and literary movements where such thinking for a while prevailed, from Socrates to Melville, Mythology to Romanticism. Here the poem is approached as something deeply rooted in human consciousness, done so not to make an atavistic claim about poetry's history, but to show the ways in which oldest tradition gives us ever-new eyes.
The hope this study reveals that poetry (poetic expression, the wild wonder of working in words) turns us back toward the world in more vibrant, more open, more ethical ways. "How to Draw a Circle" summons lyric powers -- not as an argument, but as a participation in the ways poetry works in us and on us.
Critique: One of the best critiques and commentaries on the art and impact of poetry and verse upon the human mind and emotions in many a year, this paperback edition of Dan Beachy-Quick's "How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing" from the University of Michigan Press is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study that is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Literary/Poetry Criticism collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, and anyone who has (or aspires to) crafting poetry of their own that "How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $19.95).
Editorial Note: Dan Beachy-Quick is University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University. His books of poetry include, Circle's Apprentice (2011, Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry), gentlessness (2015), Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019, long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry) and Arrows (2020). In 2016 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Beachy-Quick)
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Anonymous (G.)
Timothy O'Brien
Max Burger -- "Even in Death"
Gloria Galloway -- "Amber's Way"
David Baldwin -- "Poor Lyrics & Chants"
Janet Zinn -- "In the Time of Coronavirus"
Hanna Hasl-Kelchner -- "Seeking Fairness at Work"
Arthur M. James -- "Untertauchen: A Historical Novel"
Donna Debbs -- "Wash Your Brain: Stories. Laughter. Yoga. Life."
Lynn Prazych -- "Fathers: Letters of Healing on a Quest for the Truth"
Stephen L. Wilson -- "Answering The Call" & "Advising Chang's Army"
Donald W. Kruse -- "Blue Jays in Heaven" & "Shane's Flying Pajamas!"
Craig A. Cline -- "GoldenRuleism: Living a GoldenRuleism-Guided Life"
Tara Bracco -- "Poetic People Power: Three Spoken Word Shows for Social Change"
Kellie Watkins -- Jahphut
Hannibal Boxing Media. LLC
Deborah Bailey -- Bonfire Media, LLC
Elizabeth Frazier -- Waldmania! PR
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If you have postage stamps to donate, or if you have a book you'd like considered for review, then send those postage stamps (always appreciated, never required), or a published copy of that book (no galleys, uncorrected proofs, or Advance Reading Copies), accompanied by a cover letter and some form of publicity release to my attention at the address below.
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So until next time -- goodbye, good luck, and good reading!
Jim Cox
Midwest Book Review
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James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
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