Today I had the pleasure to attend Book Expo America (BEA), the largest book conference in America. Geared toward publishing professionals, booksellers and educators, BEA is probably the only opportunity you’ll have to see the number of men come anywhere close to the number of women in publishing. (Seriously. There were men there. And they like BOOKS.)

Though this wasn’t my first time around the BEA dance floor, I am reminded about a few things every year. Here are the highlights (and lessons relearned) today!

1.) Pounding the Javits Center hurts. A lot. Today’s heels means tomorrow will be spent in flip flops. As in other years though, I am sure that by the time Thursday comes around, everybody will be in sneakers and jeans, and they will be much more selective about the amount of swag they want to carry.

2.) About swag. It’s heavy. Free ARCs (advanced reader copies) freaking rock! At the next pub party, you get to talk about all the books you’ve read that the general public won’t even get to touch, let alone finish reading, for another two to six months. But they are still made of paper (at this point), and so by the third day, you become a little more picky about what swag you want to carry out with you. Book with a three page sex scene between woman and monkey, yes. (It’s literary fiction, it actually looks quite good!) Book that’s being handed out at self-publishing booth, perhaps not. (Lesson here — less free books handed out on Tuesday, so if you are a self-published author at BEA, go then. Less competition for bag space, and generally more excitement for the free.)

3.) Industry panels. Today’s panels were all about social media. Authors, aspiring authors, publishers — it comes down to Nike’s infamous slogan — just do it. (It was perhaps said more eloquently than that. But another thing I’ve learned about panels is that brevity is key. Especially when chances are, your topic is going to overlap with another panel your audience sat through just an hour or two before.)

4.) It’s still kind of odd to approach your favorite authors for signings. At BEA, authors are like celebrities, but more accessible and with a slightly more awkward following. In fact, last year, my colleague and I said to Jonathan Lethem as he signed our books, “we are extremely awkward.” That, of course, made things even more awkward.

5.) It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember who you’ve met in real life, and who you recognize from their Twitter handle. Is that an editor I’ve met before at a lunch? Or someone who happens to tweet very frequently in my feed? Oh wait, I must know them from Twitter because I’ve seen pictures of their cats! And speaking of Twitter, now as the speaker you can see in real time if your audience thinks your panel sucks. Talk about pressure!

6.) Book parties. Book nerds know how to party. We really do. Last year, I managed to rip a hole in my shirt at a tweet-up. A tweet-up! So far, my shirts remain intact. But BEA is young. There are still two more days of swag collecting, Twitter stalking and pub partying.

I’m exhausted! But it’s true guys — BEA is like Christmas in May. (If you habitually go to happy hours during Christmas.)

Yeah I know he's a pretty good read...

“This book is presented as a work of fiction and is dedicated to nobody.”

So begins Bukowski’s debut novel Post Office, which, as the dedication implies, is a reluctant and drunken stagger through Bukowski stand-in Henry Chinaski’s tenure at the US Postal Service. Bukowski had a knack for writing hilarious and fitting dedications like these, yet another reason why he’s so awesome (you can also throw this song on that pile of awesome as well). Ham on Rye, for example, is dedicated to “All the fathers,” which seems benign until you actually read the book and see that Bukowski’s dad was a cruel and abusive douchebag. Pulp is optimistically dedicated to “Bad writing.”

Bukowski actually got me thinking about other memorable dedications, those oft-overlooked little prefaces that are really like literary tattoos: they stay with you for life, so perhaps you should think twice before ascribing your current flame’s name on there in big bold letters. A quick browse through my bookshelf revealed some memorable finds between all the For My Mothers and To My Beloved Whomevers. Because I’m so wonderful I’ve shared a few of them below:

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Who and what do you want to be in 2010 (but more importantly, why)?

Today is New Year’s Eve and like many people at this very moment, I’ve been thinking about my resolutions.  I’ve shunned this tradition the past couple years because for some reason – if I clearly stated I was going to do something – the likelihood of it not happening was even higher than if I had not said anything at all.

I enjoyed a pretty successful first year out of college but like many, the recession soon found me and my hopes for steady work and monetary stability were knifed in the face.  This year, I learned that “Freelancer” was just a glorified term for “Intermittently Unemployed.”  Naturally, this leant me quite a bit of time to sit on my couch and stew in my own thoughts.  It took awhile to boil down the carcass of my early twenty-something idealism, but at the end of 2009 I found myself with a rather flavorful confit of hope and aspirations.  Since I wasn’t sure where to start, I asked a handful of friends what their personal resolutions would be.  Most were pretty run-of-the-mill (you know, like “getting in shape” or “getting out of debt”) and I’m not really the biggest fan of run-of-the-mill.  I was also set on making my resolutions concrete and more specific (you know, like “double the income I had in 2009” instead of “earn more money” or “master the Arabic language” instead of “learn new stuff”).  My desire to prevent my resolution from being ill-defined was shot to death (wow, my writing is violent tonight) upon asking my friend Bryan what his resolution was going to be.

“I’m going to be more awesome.” Read more »

Bella was wandering through the forest, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two little men, so suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered herself, feeling sure they that they must be real.

They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other’s neck, and though they had looked very nearly the same from far away, now that she was closer Bella could see that they were rather different indeed, for one of them very pale-skinned and had large, pointy teeth, and the other’s face was covered entirely in russet-coloured fur. “Oh, my!” Bella said to herself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stranger-looking pair in all my life!”

The little man with the sharp teeth stood very still, and if it wasn’t for his twin distractedly scratching his own fur—”As though he has fleas!” Bella thought with a shudder—she would have quite forgot they were alive. She was just inching her way past the pair, doing her best to keep well away from the flea-ridden one, when she was startled by a voice coming from the little man with the very sharp teeth.

“My name is Edward. And this is Jacob. Who are you?” he said. “And would you tell me, please, why do you smell so very good?” Read more »

I’m suddenly fascinated with French novelist Marie Darrieussecq, not just for her work but also because of her unique approach to the writing process. In a recent talk for the Frieze Foundation (available as a free download for anyone interested), she borrowed ideas from biology, philosophy, anthropology, and astrophysics, among other seemingly unrelated disciplines, to explain the writer’s place on and in relation to the planet. While writing, she strives to achieve a state of absence in both mind and body so as to become purely a part of the earth and its processes. She says, “the earth writes through me…I really sound like a crazy person.”

Almost. But as artists, isn’t that what we do–drive ourselves crazy with our own thoughts? What so intrigued me about Darrieussecq was her extreme emphasis on awareness. She considers everything from the activities at the molecular level to the shape of the moon. They’re the sort of thoughts that tend to make a person feel very insignificant in the scheme of things. But I suppose that’s the point. Darrieussecq notes that we tend to forget we humans are merely animals, only exceptional in that we’ve reached a state of civilization wherein we have no more predators. However, she says, “in our archaic mind we are still those people in caves to escape the bears, and I also write not about that, but with that.” Word.

Darrieussecq also read from her short story “Ghost Flat (A Modern Couple),” a metaphysical and existential work which I enjoyed enormously and transcribed for you, below. She wrote the story at the request of two architects, Décosterd and Rahm, based on the “ghost apartment” they invented, an interesting space-efficient architectural design you can read more about here. The short story was published about a decade ago in Japan, and apparently isn’t available anywhere (that, or Google has failed me). After the jump, a transcript of Darrieussecq’s reading of “Ghost Flat (A Modern Couple).”

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I am utterly enthralled with Sam Shepard’s story “Four Days” in the new Paris Review. With a scene, specifically: a man is trapped inside a restaurant bathroom and is driven mad by the Shania Twain playing on the sound system all night. Despite the material being absolutely insane, it’s written quite well. And for both those reasons I wanted to share it. Excerpt after the jump. Read more »