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Michael Knight signs THE TYPIST
Thu, 09/02/2010 - 6:00pm
"I BELIEVED AND BREATHED EVERY SINGLE WORD."
Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II in occupied Japan, among General MacArthur's headquarters which has moved its office from the Phillipines to Tokyo in September, 1945, the narrator of Michael Knight's skillfully told tale is a typist in this office, Francis Vancleave, whose life becomes caught in the fates of those around him: his battle-veteran bunkmate and the two Japanese women they meet; Van's stateside wife whose news in a letter to him one day changes his life; and MacArthur's young son, befriended by Van at the request of the General because "the boy was spoiled, yes, but he was so marooned by the nature of his life, he was ignorant of his privilege. It's possible he was the loneliest person I ever met." A mere 190 pages, you think you want a book this small that is this good to be a longer book -- except it's perfect as it is, a book Richard Bausch deemed "imagining at its finest," and about which Elizabeth Gilbert said "There is not a misstep, not a mislaid sentence. I believed and breathed every single word." Attn: Hollywood -- The Typist would make one hell of a movie. RH
MICHAEL KNIGHT APPEARS AT OFF SQUARE THIS FALL ON THACKER MOUNTAIN RADIO (September 2nd at 6PM)
Square Books Blog
Wylie World Deflates
Posted August 25th, 2010
From news reports around the world today it is now known that Random House and literary agent Andrew Wylie have reached an agreement over the control of digital publishing rights of authors represented by the Wylie agency and published in the U. S. by Random House. Apparently Random House controls those rights.But whether this agreement occurred as a result of legal authority or through Random House's threat not to do business with Wylie's clients we do not know. Wylie's overnight enterprise, Odyssey Editions, still apparently has digital rights to the works of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Oliver Sacks.
The day we heard at Square Books that Wylie had created an exlusive arrangement with Amazon to publish e-book editions, we immediately created a window display of Wylie authors' books, all tagged with a "This book NOT for sale" bookmark, as a way of demonstrating the harmful potential that such a monopoly held for readers.
In Celebration of James Dickey
Posted August 25th, 2010
Dwight Garner has an interesting article in today's New York Times--a piece written about James Dickey on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Deliverance. It reminded us of the visits that this writer, who had a sort of deliberately constructed larger-than-life personna, literary and otherwise, made to Oxford and to Square Books. Lisa and I first met Dickey in 1977 when we were booksellers in Washington, D. C., and attended a public reading by all the then-former poetry consultants to the Library of Congress.
James E. Pitts (1967-2010)
Posted August 21st, 2010
Longtime Square Books friend and a-long-time-ago bookseller James E. Pitts died on Thursday, August 19, 2010, after a long illness. Originally from Corinth, where he was born in 1967, he lived in Oxford since moving here circa 1990, after finishing Northeast Community College. Following a short stint in the flower shop on Van Buren where Bottletree Bakery now is, he got on at Square Books after being coached by his friend, Marc Smirnoff, who worked at Square Books at the time and included among his tips for employment, "don't tell them you know me." Jimmy worked in shipping and receiving, where he became known mostly for being himself.
