Significant Objects

1) Stephen O’Connor’s new collection of stories, Here Comes Another Lesson, has just been published by Free Press. He will be giving readings and participating in other events throughout September and October. For details and reviews, click here.

2) Rosecrans Baldwin’s first novel, You Lost Me There, has received raves from NPR, the Daily Beast, and Entertainment Weekly. The book is a NYTBR editor’s pick. He’ll be reading in New York on September 15 at McNally-Jackson Books.

* For more Author Updates, click here. Don’t forget to check out the Significant Objects Book Shop, titles added regularly!

In progress

Hello, friends and readers and interested parties:

Just a quick word to say we’re here, and there will be news of our activities soon. We’re hard at work finalizing the lineup and other details of the Significant Objects book. We’ll have more to say and announce soon. Thank you for your patience!

(more…)

• Toronto Star on dating/social sites that match by taste in books and the like. http://bit.ly/9ADO4a #
• Grumbler assesses NYT article claiming "social stigma" attached to reading books in public. http://bit.ly/cUZiir #
• Climb Inside Bookshelf Tower http://tumblr.com/xr4gn8y9n #
• Mushrooms + 40,000 Discarded Books = 1 Garden of Knowledge: http://tumblr.com/xr4gn2ydt (via @TreeHugger) #
• How To Turn Old Paperbacks into Custom Hardbacks http://tumblr.com/xr4gn2j7b #
• "50 Sad Chairs," cool-looking book. http://tumblr.com/xr4gk65xs #
• Science asserts that Greek statues were surprisingly tacky http://tumblr.com/xr4gk58m9 #

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1. The Huffington Post recently named Andrew Ervin’s debut Extraordinary Renditions one of the 15 “Most Anticipated Books for the Rest of 2010.” The book will be published on Sept. 1. (Pre order from our shop.)

2. Benjamin Percy received a starred review for his debut novel, The Wilding (also in our shop) — “As close as you can get to a contemporary Deliverance.” He is also profiled by Publishers Weekly here.

3. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has a new story about the dangers of mating with a poet, or being a poet and mating with a non-poet, posted on Douglas Glover’s fiction magazine Numéro Cinq.

* For more Author Updates, click here. Don’t forget to check out the Significant Objects Book Shop, titles added regularly!

1. William Gibson’s Zero History, his tenth novel, will be released September 3 in the UK, September 7 in the US. He will be touring the US, UK and Canada during September and October.

2. Jason Grote’s play 1001 will run at Chicago’s Chopin Theater from Sept. 9-Oct. 9 in a production from Collaboraction. Look for the feature in Time Out.

3. Dzanc books will publish Terese Svoboda’s fifth novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, on Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19 at Bluestockings. The first chapter’s at HTML Giant, and she’ll read it live at the Brooklyn Book Festival, 10 a.m. September 10 with Pers Petterson and Scott Spencer, in a program called Being is Scary. “Told entirely through dialogue, this quirky tale of period pirate wannabes makes a jeu d’esprit of the privateer life even as it baldly de-romanticizes it… Periodic visits from a mermaid (perhaps their half-sister) and a parrot who steals the scene every time he croaks “Hanged!” add to the fun.” —Publisher’s Weekly. The trailer for the book is here.

* For more Author Updates, click here. Don’t forget to check out the Significant Objects Book Shop, titles added regularly!

1) Dean Haspiel won an Emmy for Outstanding Title Design (for Bored to Death). Also, Haspiel’s app/comic STREET CODE #1 launched earlier this month; and from October 2 – December 12, there will be an exhibition on the making of the graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution (by Haspiel and Inverna Lockpez) at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn.

2) Robert Lopez’s new collection of stories, Asunder, is due out from Dzanc Books in November.

* For more Author Updates, click here.

• How to turn a book into a book rack. http://tumblr.com/xr4gfwuwr #
• "Odd website where people photograph themselves feeding food to inanimate objects." http://bit.ly/9qlWiq #
• Atlantic on book about pre-Kindle "reading revolution," The Book In The Renaissance. http://bit.ly/bmTHov #
• Salvation Army encourages thrifters to post (Significant?) finds on its Tumblr http://tumblr.com/xr4g9i8y2 #
• Book of essays about "voluntary suffering" is printed in the author's blood. http://bit.ly/cyGiFP #
• The blog Things Organized Neatly collects pictures of same. Like this one. http://tumblr.com/xr4g90k1p #
• "J.D. Salinger's Toilet Offered for $1 Million on eBay." A significant object? Perhaps. We should commission a story. http://bit.ly/9tEpve #
• Why no people in the pictures? "Look closely, they are all over the place." http://tumblr.com/xr4fvd5wb #

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Our shop. Click to visit. More titles added all the time.

We’ve just started a “bookstore” page using Amazon Associates, where we’ll gradually be adding works by all of our 200+ contributors who have books for sale. To keep it from being too overwhelming, we’re starting with a small number (all recent releases), and adding a few new titles every weekday, so keep an eye on it. There’s a tab for the bookstore above header, and the url is: http://significantobjects.com/bookstore/.

Obviously you should buy them all to support our superlative writer crew, but it is also noteworthy that whatever you spend via our “shop,” some sliver of dough will flow to the S.O. team to help offset our expenses.

Because Significant Objects works only with the finest writers around, it is certain that all your purchases through our shop will be enjoyable and enlightening. Also, each of these books makes a fine gift, for any occasion.

Thank you.

This summer, I’ve been scanning and posting the covers of my “File X” collection — i.e., paperback novels from the 1940s-70s the titles of which include a freestanding letter “X” — to my other website, HiLobrow.

This was intended to be a ten-part series of posts. However, in response to the demands of HiLobrow, Boing Boing and io9 readers, today I posted the eleventh in what is now a series of twenty.

Hope Significant Objects readers enjoy the gallery of pulp fiction goodness!

1) Kate Bernheimer has two new books out: Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press, illustrated by Rikki Ducornet), a collection of her “forceful and spirited stories that will definitely prove disturbing” (according to Library Journal Review); and she’s edited My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin Non-Classics), which includes stories by Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Kelly Link, and a number of Significant Objects authors, including Aimee Bender, Kevin Brockmeier, Shelley Jackson, Neil LaBute, and Jim Shepard. Phew! Plus, Bernheimer is editing and publishing a new series, called “Conversations with Ghosts“; and she’s producing Songs for Fairy Tales, a limited-edition CD compilation of original fairy-tale inspired music created by, among others, Significant Objects authors Willy Vlautin and the duo Rick Moody/John Wesley Harding.

2) That’s a tough act to follow, so we’ll just report that the SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS book forthcoming from Fantagraphics is shaping up nicely. At some point in the near future we’ll announce which stories from volumes 1-3 will be included in the collection. Stay tuned!

* For more Author Updates, click here.

At WIRED SCIENCE, earlier this month, science journalist Jonah Lehrer explained “something important about how the human mind calculates value.”

There’s now suggestive evidence that our faith in the authentic — especially when the authenticity is supported by effective marketing campaigns — is a deep-seated human instinct, which emerges at an extremely early age. Consider a clever experiment led by the psychologists Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom. The scientists tested 43 children between the ages of three and six. The children were shown a “copying machine” [...] A ‘‘stretchy man’’ was then placed in the box and the illusion repeated. Interestingly, the young children actually preferred the “duplicate” toy and chose it 62 percent of the time. The kids didn’t worry about the “authenticity” of the stretchy man. But Hood and Bloom didn’t stop there. They also had many of the young kids bring in their “attachment objects,” such as their favorite blanket or stuffed animal. (I still remember losing Johnny, my stuffed penguin, at the tender age of five. Grief.) The scientists then offered to “copy” the object for the kids. Four of the children simply refused — they wouldn’t let their blankie anywhere near that nefarious device. But even those kids who allowed their attachment object to be “copied” almost always refused to see the objects as equivalent. The new duplicate was a bootleg blankie, an ersatz stuffed animal. Even though the children were assured that the objects were identical, they intuitively believed that the copy wasn’t the same. It lacked a history, a bond, a sentimental attachment. It was inauthentic.

The same principle, Lehrer suggests, applies to brands: “The best brands are blankies.”

A quick note: I just did a short interview about S.O. (and objects and value and story) on Where We Live, with John Dankonsky, on Connecticut Public Radio. I chimed in for about the last 15 minutes, in what I believe was an hour-long segment with Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. It was very pleasant and informative, and it has been archived here if you’re curious.

If any listeners to that broadcast have found their way here: We’ve been on a bit of a summer hiatus but will be publishing new stories (and auctions) in the fall, and look out for our book in 2011. Sign up for email updates here.