if you don’t know about mcsweeney’s you are in for a treat.  mcsweeney’s is something i didn’t know about until i started working at lemuria and am more than jazzed about every time a new issue comes out.  here’s a little about mcsweeney’s taken from their website:

“McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines.  But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces primarily written with McSweeney’s in mind.  Since then, McSweeney’s has attracted works from some of the finest writers in the country, including Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Ben Marcus, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T.C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Gabe Hudson, Robert Coover, Ann Beattie, and many others.”

“Today, McSweeney’s has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals, with an expanding, loyal subscriber base and strong independent bookstore following. As a small publishing house, McSweeney’s is committed to finding new voices—Gabe Hudson, Paul Collins, Neal Pollack, J.T. Leroy, John Hodgman, Amy Fusselman, Salvador Plascencia and Sean Wilsey are among those whose early work appeared in McSweeney’s—and promoting the work of gifted but underappreciated writers, such as Lydia Davis and Stephen Dixon.”

“Recent books and journals have appeared on bestseller lists around the country and have won multiple literary and design awards, including stories selected for the Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, the O. Henry Awards, and the Best American Short Stories. Two of our books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Design awards include AIGA 50 Books Award, AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award. McSweeney’s books have appeared in design exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum and the Pasadena Museum.”

i’ve only been collecting mcsweeney’s issues for a couple of years and have only read a couple of them.  mcsweeney’s isn’t just collected for the words inside the issues but also for the amazing packaging that they come in.

“McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and we try to make each issue very different from the last. One issue came in a box, one was Icelandic, and one looks like a pile of mail. In all, we give you groundbreaking fiction and much more.”

i collect the quarterly concern but that’s not all that they publish in the least.  they also have two other publications, a paper magazine and a dvd magazine.  

“The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and that are very often very long. There are interviews that are also very long. The Believer is printed in four colors on heavy stock paper.”

“Wholphin is a quarterly DVD magazine featuring short films, documentaries, animation, and instructional videos that have not, for whatever reason, found wide release. Recent issues of Wholphin have included films by Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Miranda July, Miguel Arteta, Errol Morris, and Steven Soderbergh, and performances from John C. Reilly, Selma Blair, Patton Oswalt, Andy Richter, a monkey-faced eel, and many others.”

and just to top it off, they also publish books.  one of our first editions club picks from last year, Citrus County by John Brandon was published by mcsweeney’s.

by Zita

As kid’s manager, I get to meet amazing young people who are as smart as tacks. Two of those amazing people are Lauren Allen and Tracy Rappai. Not only are they good readers (they are both in my 6th/7th grade book club!) but also have published their own book of poems (penned by Lauren) and illustrations (drawn by Tracy) entitled Me, My Thoughts, and You. Last time I saw them, I got to ask them a few questions about their book and their publishing experience:

EG: How long did it take y’all to get everything ready for publication?

Lauren and Tracy’s book is beautiful, inside and out. Come meet  Lauren and Tracy today at Lemuria at 4:30! Cupcakes and great company will be in abundance!

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (Harper, 2008)

Dan Ariely defines predictably irrational: Our irrationality happens the same way again and again; our irrational behaviors are neither random or senseless, they are systematic and since we repeat them again and again, predictable.

Predictably Irrational (PI) addresses imprinting, why we stick with decisions once they are made. In running a small business in a highly competitive marketplace, it is important to learn about consumer behavior and loyalty. PI is thought-provoking as it addresses why and how consumer ch0ices are made. Lemuria wants our readers to understand their reading choices. We encourage those decisions to be made consciously, with book purchases adding the highest reader value for the time spent.

Ariely explores why we stick with decisions once they are made. Reading his case studies allows us to reflect on our own habits and understanding their results. Irrational behaviors are neither random or senseless, they are systematic and predictable. We often make the same mistakes over and over again responding to the basic wiring of our brain. Two sections that spoke to me were the explorations of predictably irrational as an explanation of our consumer and workplace habits.

As we spend our money, most transactions have a downside, but when something is free we forget the downside. Free gives us an emotional charge that causes us to perceive that the free item is immensely more valuable than it really is. Ariely asserts this is because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. From a consumer perspective, one association I have with “free” is with Amazon shipping which causes us to fall into the trap of buying something we don’t need but emotionally think we want. As consumers actualize, I feel manipulative strategies of the “sucker punch” marketing will become less influential in the future. Marketing “Free” and “Sale” should digress as consumers become more aware of these deceptive tendencies. To buy in excess just because something is free or on sale is another predictably irrational behavior.

On the other hand, how often do we experience marketing that tells the consumer that a high price is simply the high price of ownership, the high price of a social relationship, or the high price of being unique–causing us to pay more than we feel we should. This causes more emotional loss than we gain from the product or the experience.

I especially enjoyed Ariely’s section on predictably irrational in the workplace. He addresses procrastination and self control at work and why we lose this fight so often. Giving up our long term goals for immediate gratification is procrastination. We forget the problems these poor choices cause fellow workers whose tasks are dependent on others time lines. All good small business owners know that everyone has problems with procrastination. Management’s job of getting workers to recognize and admit their weaknesses is difficult. However, those workers that deal with these issues responsibly are in better position to utilize the tools to overcome their work flaws, thus doing a better job and increasing their take home rewards.

The author also addresses dishonesty and what we can do about it. He explains the method to our madness of being prone to steal when cash is not involved. Cash ties in a directness to a person which is more prohibitive than not paying on charge accounts. Or, the idea that you would steal music off the Internet easily but wouldn’t consider shoplifting a CD from a store. I wonder are publishers going to have this problem with e-books in the future.

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is an easy-to-read cultural study. If you like reading Malcolm Gladwell, this might be a book for you.

It has been six weeks ago since Borders declared bankruptcy and announced the closing of more than 200 stores in an attempt to restructure their retail business model. I went to New Orleans to the beautiful Borders on St. Charles (a former funeral home) for the opening weekend of closing sales.

Borders is in the process of dumping heavily discounted books on the market. In local markets where this is taking place, retail book value is crashing for this limited time period until actual closing takes place. I presume that most of this devalued inventory was not paid for since inventory debt to the publishers is now frozen. Borders is able to raise their capital reserves since they did not pay for much of the product they are selling. (see previous blog with publisher debt figures)

Flooding these local markets in this way keeps readers from shopping the local independents. It seems to me that publishers are losing in two ways:

1. Unpaid-for inventories are being sold.

2. The lost sales by independents means less purchases from publishers, which means less paid-for inventory will be sold.

I completely understand the independents will be better off in the long run, but  all are temporarily affected by Borders’ way of doing business.

Friday, March 25th Borders released a proposal to handout $8.3 million in executive bonuses. One would have to assume these monies would have to at least partially come from Borders dumping of devalued/unpaid-for books on the market.

I’m curious as to what deal Borders and the publishers will make next. Will the publishers play hardball with the the Borders transition? Whose demands will swing the most weight? How many unpaid dollars will Border’s use to try and restructure their tool box?

There’s a particular danger when one works at a bookstore: the standard for which books are and are not worth reading becomes impossibly high, or at least, complicated. It goes something like this. For one to commit the time and energy to read a particular book, the book must:

1. Have won a major award, or
2. Be written by an author who has won major awards, or
3. Be featured in the New York Times Book Review (positively is better, but even a bad review is acceptable), or
4. Be mentioned by the publisher sales rep in a sales meeting, or
5. Be reviewed on NPR, or
6. Feature someone or something local, or
7. Be positively blurbed by at least one author we have hosted, or
8. Be compared to at least two books that we’ve enjoyed, or
9. etc.

These rules vary somewhat from person to person, but I think on some level we* all subconsciously reject books that we might otherwise enjoy, simply because they don’t fulfill all the requisite qualifications we’ve created for our own reading habits. This is to our detriment, I believe. Yes, books should be provocative, and challenging, and even difficult sometimes. But books are for our enjoyment as well, and I’ll admit that too often I’ve skipped what looked like a “fun read” because it didn’t seem weighty or important enough. Worse yet, I’ve realized that I’m much more prone to a slump in my reading when I exclude books I know I would enjoy.

This is all a convoluted introduction to the real topic here, which is: River Monsters. It’s a book by Jeremy Wade. The subtitle reads, “True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away.” The cover photo, as you can see, features Jeremy Wade holding a giant, toothy fish that he’s presumably caught. And honestly, I was pretty much sold by this point. But what sealed the deal was when I flipped to the color photo insert in the middle and found 16 pages of Jeremy Wade holding even more giant, toothy fishes. That’s really the essence of the book – story after story from Wade’s perspective, circling the globe looking for the biggest and weirdest freshwater fish. The author bio on the back flap reveals that Jeremy Wade was a copywriter and a newspaper reporter, which tells me that, at the very least, the prose won’t be distracting (and might just be pretty good).

I don’t need a book entitled “River Monsters” to be any more complicated than that. What else can I ask of this book? Not a thing.

*I switched to the plural “we” here because it was at this point that it struck me that maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m the only one who falls prey to this bad habit, and everybody else is really quite satisfied in their book-selecting ability. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own idiosyncracies on everyone else, but so be it – I’d rather think that this post finds an audience that understands what I’m talking about than believe that I’m the only one with this issue.