Goes out for Morris (and others) because Gibson

[Mark Kohut]

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

> From: The Washington Post <email at washingtonpost.com>
> Date: January 11, 2019 at 10:34:18 AM EST
> To: mark.kohut at gmail.com
> Subject: Book Club: Book hoarders of the world, unite!
> Reply-To: The Washington Post <email at washingtonpost.com>
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> Author Marie Kondo in her office in Tokyo, Japan. (Marie Takahashi for The Washington Post)
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> Marie Kondo hates books, and we’re not going to take it anymore. Okay, that’s not entirely true. But the internet reacted very negatively this week to Kondo’s shelf-tidying advice. On episode 5 of her new Netflix series, “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo,” she told a moderately cluttered couple, “Take every single book into your hands and see if it sparks joy for you.” The sparkless volumes were immediately banished from the house. That finally provoked me to stand up for disorganized bookworms and proclaim: “Keep your tidy, spark-joy hands off my book piles, Marie Kondo.”
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> Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be novelists. There was a lot of consternation this week about the results of the Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey. The median income for an American writer in 2017 was $6,080, down more than 40 percent from 2009. (The survey included traditional and self-published authors who have published at least one book.) The guide notes that authors have made up for falling book earnings by shifting to “other writing-related activities, such as speaking engagements, book reviewing or teaching.” In a statement released with the survey results, Authors Guild vice president and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo said, “Amazon, but also Google, Facebook and every other company getting into the content business, devalue what we produce to lower their costs for content distribution, and then take an unfair share of the profits from what remains for delivering that reduced product.” (Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Meanwhile, on the far, far other end of the income scale, Kristin Hannah, author of last year’s bestselling novel “The Great Alone" (review) has put her three-bedroom Hawaiian home up for sale for $10.75 million. 
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> A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES Official Trailer (HD) Teresa Palmer Fantasy
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> What to watch after “Outlander?” Last summer, the most excitement I saw at the National Book Festival was in a convention hall packed with fans of Deborah Harkness. She’s the delightful historian who cast a spell on millions of readers with her bestselling All Souls trilogy. An eight-part TV adaptation named after the first book in the trilogy, “A Discovery of Witches” (review), has been available for months in England, but not here! Next week it’s finally coming to the United States (streaming on Sundance Now and Shudder starting Jan. 17). A new tie-in edition features the stars Theresa Palmer and Matthew Goode on the cover, so expect it to magically reappear on the paperback bestseller list soon. 
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> (Berkley; Ace; Berkley)
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> What took them so long? William Gibson has been named the 35th Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Gibson will receive the lifetime honor — previously won by such luminaries as Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov — at the annual Nebula Conference in Los Angeles in May. (Ticket information here.) In her announcement of the award, SFWA President Cat Rambo wrote that William Gibson “forged a body of work that has played a major part in the coalescing of the cyberpunk movement, influencing dozens of writers of cinema, fiction, and games, among other creatives.” Reviewing “The Peripheral” for The Washington Post in 2014, Robin Sloan wrote, “Whenever I’m asked on fancy stages or across shadowed bars to name my favorite author, I always reply: William Gibson. I am forever interested in the near future, in the forward-leaning now, and no one writes it better.”
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> Julia Wang and her winning poster (Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets)
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> You’ve never heard of Julia Wang, a 10th grader from San Jose, Calif., but this April you’ll see her poster in almost every library, bookstore and school in the country. Wang is the winner of the Poetry Month poster contest for students, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Her winning design, which features lines by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, was selected from more than 450 entries. This is the first year since National Poetry Month began in 1996 that a student has created the official poster. About 100,000 copies will be distributed. 
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> U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (Photo by Robert Casper)
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> You’ll be hearing more from the poet laureate, too. At the end of last year, Tracy K. Smith started a podcast called “The Slowdown.” Next week, she’s bringing that show to public radio. (It’s a wonderful replacement for “The Writer’s Almanac,” which was a collateral victim of Garrison Keillor's sexual harassment controversy in late 2017.) Each weekday, Smith’s five-minute show offers reflections and a poetry reading. Smith, who teaches at Princeton University, writes that she wants to explore “the very real and natural ways that poems speak to the daily experience of being alive.” Last spring, Smith delivered a brilliant lecture at the Library of Congress about the negative effects of technology, so there’s something particularly wonderful about seeing her use that technology to bring us some much-needed respite.
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> (Graywolf; Ecco; Riverhead)
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> Finalists have been announced for the $20,000 Story Prize, which recognizes the best short story collection of the year: 
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> “A Lucky Man,” by Jamel Brinkley.
> “Your Duck Is My Duck,” by Deborah Eisenberg (review).
> “Florida,” by Lauren Groff (review).
> You may remember that the story collections by Brinkley and Groff were also finalists for the National Book Award in November. As Sam Sacks, the fiction critic at the Wall Street Journal, recently wrote, "The most exciting development in fiction in 2018 . . . was the unexpected banquet of top-notch story collections." The winner of the Story Prize will be announced on March 6 at a ceremony in New York where all three authors will read from and discuss their work. (Tickets are $14.) An anthology of stories selected from each of the winning collections over the past 15 years will be published in March. (Disclosure: I’m one of the three judges this year.)  
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> Stay in touch. If you have any questions or comments about this weekly newsletter or The Post’s book coverage, contact me at ron.charles at washpost.com. If you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. And if someone forwarded it to you, and you’d like to subscribe, click here. 
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