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BEA Nerdfest 2011 | Literary Kicks

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BEA Nerdfest 2011

by Le vi Ashe r on Thursday, May 26, 2011 08:19 pm EVENT S, FIC TIO N, INT ER NET C ULTUR E, NEW Y O R K CITY, PUBLISHING, R EADING

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MERMAID, the new novel Keith Donohue calls "one sexy fairy tale, a bittersw eet story about the tides that tug at the hum an heart" and Library Journal calls "absorbing, poignant and heartbreaking." Buy it now at Amazon, BN, or an indie store!

Metafiction and the 4th Wall Enter Sandman: Neil Gaiman at PEN World Voices Poker and Postmodernism: The Cards Im Playing
I've just spent three days at the biggest and most glorious nerd convention in New York City: the annual BookExpo America, or BEA.

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Purl up with a great read!

This nerd convention is different from other literary nerd conventions like DragonCon and ComicCon in one major way: there, people dress up in costumes to try to look weird, while here editors, publishers, agents, writers, distributors, bookstore owners, librarians, critics and bloggers dress up in American Apparel or Urban Outfitters and try to appear normal for three days in a row. We're not fooling anyone: we're book professionals, and we're all obsessed. The great thing about this gathering is the wide, unabashed enthusiasm

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FEATURED ARTICLES BY DEDI FELMAN

Corporate CPA Kelly Flynn is tangled up in a case w hen a friend and fellow knitter's real estate client is murdered. Join Kelly as she untangles the clues to his unexpected end. Includes a fabulous knitting pattern! From M AGGIE SEFTON Unraveled: A Knitting M ystery IN STORES NOW!

for books. From 9:30-in-the-morning panels to 2 am Soho parties, BookExpo is an intense, highly social experience. But even if the passions are highly individual, much of the constant shared buzz is about business, about the hot titles coming out from the big publishing houses. I noticed a somewhat strained effort to manufacture the word that a new novel called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach is "getting a lot of buzz", though the book looks a bit stiff to me, and I think some people may be getting it confused with last year's Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I picked up several galleys myself, including Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock, a book in which people dance about architecture, and The Dewey Decimal System, a suspense novel by Nathan Larson that ought to be popular among librarians. I spotted the shaggy-haired music writer Chuck

Enter Sandman: Neil Gaiman at PEN World Voices Adaptations: A PEN World Voices 2010 Conversation About Literature and Film Herta Who?
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Klosterman affably handing out copies of his new novel The Visible Man, which appears to be some kind of Wellsian or Doyle-esque science/mystery romp. I heard about new and upcoming books like Fathermucker by Greg Olear, Jerusalem Maiden by Talia Carner, Slingshot to the Juggernaut by Sander Hicks and Lucky Bruce, a memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman. BookExpo creates serendipity. On Tuesday I ran into Duff McKagan of Guns 'N' Roses on the floor, and grabbed a preview galley of his upcoming

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Fiction and Cultural Memory: Writing From Ceausescu's Romania The Conformism of Postmodern Style An Unlikely Cocktail: Mixing Pop and Bourbon in

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memoir It's So Easy (and Other Lies). The next day, strolling towards a corner where I hoped to find hot dogs for sale, I spotted Tom Wilson of the Ziggy comic strip (the son of the original Tom Wilson, now a Ziggy cartooonist in his own right) cutting into a big Ziggy cake for a cheering crowd. Most rewardingly, strolling past a publisher called Quest Books that specializes in religious titles, I spotted a book called Working Class Mystic: A Spiritual Biography of George Harrison by Garry Tillery. If you know anything about my alley, you know this is right up it. Quest Books wasn't actually trying to give away copies of this book, but I cajoled one for keeps and promised to blog about it (I just did). FEATURED ARTICLES BY GARRETT KENYON

the Palace of Versailles

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Largehearted WORD Books of the Week - June 15, 2011 Boy Funnies BAMcinemaFest: On Tour and Where Soldiers Come From The New Finnegans Wake Seven Republican Dwarfs On Not Going Out of the House: Thoughts About Plotlessness Book Review: Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films by James Chapman Read more...

I was happy to meet for the first time three writers whose books I've enthused about here on LitKicks: Greg Ames (Buffalo Lockjaw), Andrew Shaffer (Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love), and the truly inspiring Vanessa Veselka, whose awesome novel Zazen is getting some real buzz (much better than the manufactured kind).

The Top Ten Crime and Mystery Novels of 2009 Advancing the Darkness: Five Modern Masters of Mystery and Crime CrimeStars: Ten Prophets of the Golden Age of Ultraviolence
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What else? I enjoyed hearing from Misha Glouberman, Kevin Smokler, Ben Greeman and Colson Whitehead at 7x20x21, a fast-moving speaker session that prevents boredom by pushing new slides every 20 seconds (though, in the case of a segment by Huge CEO Aaron Shapiro, the format was not enough to save him). I'm excited about One and Only: The Untold Story of On The Road by Jack Kerouac scholar Gerry Nicosia, a dogged researcher who managed to make contact with LuAnne Henderson, one of the major real-life characters behind Kerouac's On The Road, who has finally revealed her own side of the famous story to Nicosia (LuAnne's character, Marylou, will be played by Kristen Stewart in the upcoming movie). I also enjoyed chatting with this book's publisher, the charming Brenda Knight. I met Adam Mansbach, author of the popular new book for new parents to read to children, Go The F**k To Sleep, which is thankfully proving that it's possible to publish a big hit "novelty book" that isn't a damn zombie mashup.

EARLE

THE JEFFERSON KEY

For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn. Jonathan Swift and Lady Montagu: an 18th Century Literary Smackdown Villanelles, Sonnets and Meter
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Francoise Sagan: Sex, Drugs and Literature Marcel Proust: Beyond the Madeleines Capitaine Achab
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Think you know w hat's in the U.S. Constitution? Think again... Read THE JEFFERSON KEY, the new thriller by bestselling author Steve Berry. "THE JEFFERSON KEY mixes American history w ith pageturning suspense in a delightful concoction." -Associated Press Order your copy today! Read a free excerpt! Read more...

The nighttime party scene was fun, of course, and I'm still exhausted from the weeklong hysteria. I met several other cool literary bloggers, and I'm happy to report that the litblog community is still alive and bringing in new faces (I'm skipping an associated "Book Bloggers Convention" taking place today, though; I just need a rest). Perhaps my only disappointment was the lack of attention towards e-book technology, which is clearly the new horizon. I understand that several panel discussions at the conference were about e-books, but I didn't want to hear people talking about e-books at this year's BEA: I wanted to see what these publishers were doing to best tease out the creative possibilities of this new format. I didn't see much to speak of here at all.

Beatniks: How I Wrote A Subculture Guidebook Baseball: The Great American Literary Sport Written In Prison
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A STEAMY NEW READ!

For all its literary splendor, BookExpo is a business conference, though I took a break from covering a lot of the business chatter this year. If you'd like to hear more about what went down, here's a whole lot more to read.

ASHER

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It's love and bullets, ERIC JEROME DICKEY style! From the New York Times bestselling author TEM PTED BY TROUBLE For Dmytryk and Cora, there's only one w ay to fight the recession: rob a few banks. It'll be quick, no one gets hurt, and there's a big payoff. Good luck believing that... ON SALE NOW!

The Beat Generation Jack Kerouac In Gatsby's Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo
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3 reponses to "BEA Nerdfest 2011"

by Bill_Ectric on Friday , May 27, 2011 11:12 am Thanks for bringing the BEA into my living room with your good reporting, Levi. Wow, you got to meet Vanessa Veselka! Cool. Zazen is a very engaging book. reply

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Mary Shelley Story Metafiction and the 4th Wall
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by Claudia on Saturday , May 28, 2011 01:00 pm Levi, it looks like the Reuters article also gives encouraging information about the future of ebooks, but is somewhat more optimistic than you. Probably the big publishers are still in the testing MOST READ THIS YEAR

City Of The Snakes

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the waters phase before they take more of a plunge. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/27/us-books-ebooksidUSTRE74Q5J02... reply

by Shiggy Martin on Tuesday , May 31, 2011 11:42 am You neglected to mention the nerd expo, PAX. No worries. reply

Bob Dylan's Renaldo and Clara To Be Finally Released A Little Wget Magic: The Amazing Saga of Mark Zuckerberg Fiction and Cultural Memory: Writing From Ceausescu's Romania The Conformism of Postmodern Style
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