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Famed author Joyce Carol Oates gave a commencement address at the graduation ceremony for Niagara County Community College’s class of 2015. The video embedded above features Oates delivering her speech. Time.com has posted her piece in its entirety.

Here’s an excerpt: “An attitude that goes beyond ambition into the realm of the spiritual, the uncharitable; what in boxing, as perhaps in other sports, is called ‘heart’—the indefinable core of an individual that declares I WILL NOT GIVE UP; I WILL PERSEVERE. Without ‘heart’ an athlete might have a professional career but he/she cannot be a great champion. The writing students of mine who have gone on to be truly successful, in several cases quite impressive careers, were individuals who worked—worked—worked—and did not allow rejections to dissuade them of their inner worth.”

In the past, a great number of authors have given moving commencement speeches. Poet Mary Karr spoke about the purpose of poetry at the 2015 Syracuse University’s graduation. Coraline writer Neil Gaiman’s 2012 \"Make Good Art\" talk went viral. Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling’s 2008 \"Very Good Lives\" talk has drawn more than 1.5 million views on YouTube. (via Flavorwire.com)

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Michael McKenzie has been named executive director of publicity at Algonquin. His start date has been set for May 26th.

McKenzie will be based at the publishing house’s New York office. He will manage publicity projects for both the adult and children’s books list.

Prior to this development, McKenzie serve as the senior of director of publicity of the Ecco and Harper imprints at HarperCollins. In the past, he has worked on campaigns for authors Michael Chabon, Amy Tan, and Joyce Carol Oates.

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HarperCollins has established a new partnership with JetBlue. Henceforth, the content platform on JetBlue’s Fly-Fi (a special inflight Wi-Fi program) will feature content from HarperCollins books.

For this month, passengers will be able to read excerpts from Patricia Cornwell’s thriller novel Flesh and Blood, Amy Poehler’s memoir Yes Please, and James Dean’s children’s book Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses. Readers will have also have the option to purchase any of the available titles from a plethora of booksellers.

Here’s more from the press release: “At launch, JetBlue customers will be able to choose from excerpts of books by Daniel Silva, Martin Short, Anthony Bourdain, Patti Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Carine McCandless, Paulo Coelho, Patricia Cornwell, Dorothea Benton Frank, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Dick Couch, Amy Poehler, James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton, Peter Lerangis, Herman Parish, James Dean, Nate Ball, Dan Gutman, Lauren Oliver, and Erin Hunter. Titles will change monthly. Books from these HarperCollins authors will be available to customers as e-samplers via JetBlue’s Fly-Fi Hub, which is currently accessible on 35% of their fleet.”

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Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Aerosmith rocker Joe Perry and music historian Eddie Trunk will sit for a conversation about Perry’s new book, Rocks. Hear them on Tuesday, October 7th at Barnes & Noble (Union Square) starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

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According to the betting site Ladbrokes, Haruki Murakami has 3/1 odds to win the most prestigious literary prize. Joyce Carol Oates has 6/1 odds and Alice Munro has 12/1 odds.

As literary types speculate about this year’s nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature before the official announcement, UK gamblers are hard at work trying to predict a winner of the prestigious prize.

Betting has been suspended on Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Michael Orthofer speculated about this change on Twitter: “Presumably too much ££ being placed on him … There isn’t a winner yet, but maybe a leak that Ngũgĩ a finalist leading to bets on him?”

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I’m stepping out from under my self-imposed Cone of Silence . . .

. . . to share the happy news that my new Young Adult novel, Before You Go, will be reviewed in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Book Review. In fact, the way these things work, it’s already online.

For authors, the NYTBR is still the paper of record, and it’s a great feeling to be included in that conversation.

When you tell people that you write children’s books there’s a variety of reactions and non-reactions. Some folks are impressed, even jealous. Others are mute, mystified, and possibly suspicious. The conversation quickly shifts. But a review in the Times is the kind of thing that even Uncle Hank in Elmira can respect.

Money quote:

“Preller makes us care about these people.

We wonder about them when they’re gone.”

Here’s the link to the full piece, which includes a review of Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You by Joyce Carol Oates. Some nobody, I guess.

But seriously, Joyce Carol Oates and me. As if we were equals.

More relevant passages:

Preller has created the kind of male protagonist mothers will love for their daughters. Jude is gentle, thoughtful, nonsteroidal and blessedly free of strut. He’s got good friends who don’t tempt trouble, or, at least, don’t tempt all that much. In fact, they are not “geeks, not freaks, not burnouts. In that sense they were like the color black, actually an absence of color, defined by what it was not: not blue, red, orange, green, heliotrope or puce.”

Moreover, Jude is respectful of the girl he likes, and (bonus points) he’s chosen the right girl, the utterly likable Becka. Most of Jude’s friends know his little sister died seven years ago when Jude was only 9 years old. What they don’t know is just how responsible he feels.

The car accident will, of course, change everything; how could it not? It will test Jude’s faith in the world and his relationships. And if sometimes the exposition grows oversaturated with details about, say, beach-side concession stands or boy-quality zombie talk; if the language doesn’t quite lift off the page as much as it might; if, at times, the action slows just a bit too much, Preller makes us care about these people. We wonder about them when they’re gone.

I’m grateful to Beth Kebhart for this kind, thoughtful review. It shouldn’t, but it means a lot to me (I tell myself to be impervious to these things, the accolades as well as the slings and arrows). But still: the Times! Validation, recognition, whatever you want to call it, sign me up. Though I’ve been involved in children’s books for half my life, first publishing an 8″ x 8″ picture book, Maxx Trax: Avalanche Rescue! in 1986, and later writing the Jigsaw Jones mystery series — 40 titles, 10,000,000 sold — I did not get reviewed until 2008 with Six Innings, an ALA Notable Book. If you write paperbacks, as I did, you are something of an ugly step-sister.

So the review process is a relatively new experience for me. Beth’s quibbles with the book (oh, we’ll call them quibbles, whispered softer than complaints) strike me as accurate, and certainly fair. Maybe the narrative is a little slow in parts, maybe there’s too much Jones Beach nostalgia. Too guy? I’m not sure about that (but I’m a guy). It is what it is, and I’m okay with it. Overall, my first YA has been a learning experience. I tried to write the best book I could, I really did strive to make those words lift off the page — and sometimes, here and there, maybe they do. And maybe I stumble at times, stagger around. All these years, still an apprentice. Thanks, Beth Kebhart, for the helping hand, the nod and smile across the cluttered room. At the very least, I’m grateful to have something to show Uncle Hank next time I’m up in Elmira (though, to be honest, we’ll probably skip the literary concerns and complain, instead, about the sorry state of our New York Mets).

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I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"�worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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I found him in Berlin.  I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page.  A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry.  It was that easy.

Today the fog lifts slowly.  I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week.  We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates.  We'll wade through definitions.  We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff. 

And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.

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Over at UneekDollDesigns, artist Debbie Ritter sells handmade dolls of famous authors and celebrated literary characters.

The collection includes the trio of ghosts who haunt Ebenezer Scrooge. Ritter has also created dolls of Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte‘s famous novel and Mrs. Haversham from Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit come as a matching set. Flavorpill made a list of other dolls, including Shel Silverstein, J.R.R. Tolkien and Joyce Carol Oates. Above, we’ve embedded a Mark Twain doll. What’s your favorite?

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Novelist Nnedi Okorafor has won the World Fantasy Award for her novel, Who Fears Death.

Author Jeff VanderMeer described the book: “[The novel] is a powerful combination of science fiction, fantasy, African folklore, and stark realism. It tells the story of Onyesonwu, a woman of extraordinary powers in a post-apocalyptic West Africa, a world of perils and mysteries, of lost technologies and brutal wars. Onyesonwu’s name means “Who fears death?”, and her birth is the result of rape used as a weapon in battle; this legacy affects the woman she becomes, and the novel portrays her education as a sorceress and her quest to bring order and peace to her life and world.”

The announcement was made at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. We’ve included the other award winners below…

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Next month author Jason Pinter will join Grove/Atlantic as senior marketing manager.

An active Twitter writer, Pinter tweeted the news: “On 8/8 I’ll be starting as Senior Marketing Manager for Grove/Atlantic and the newly relaunching Mysterious Press. Can’t wait.”

Otto Penzler founded Mysterious Press in 1975. In 2010, Grove/Atlantic announced they would revive the imprint. Here’s more from the publisher: “[The imprint] will feature works by such Edgar Allan Poe Award–winning authors as Thomas H. Cook, Andrew Klavan, and Thomas Perry, two-time nominee Ken Bruen, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates, PEN West Award winner Robert Ward, and Pulitzer Prize–winning Robert Olen Butler.”

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A team of authors have joined Book Wish Foundation‘s What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur project. Book sale profits will be donated to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), an organization building libraries in Darfur refugee camps in Chad.

Penguin Group’s G.P. Putnam’s Sons imprint will release the collection in September. If you make a donation of $20 or more before April 30th and your name (and your child’s) will be included in the book’s acknowledgment section.

Actress Mia Farrow, who serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, has written the forward. The participating authors include: Cornelia Funke, Meg Cabot, R. L. Stine, John Green, Ann M. Martin, Alexander McCall Smith, Cynthia Voigt, Karen Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, Nikki Giovanni, Jane Yolen, Nate Powell, Gary Soto, Jeanne DuPrau, Francisco X. Stork, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sofia Quintero.

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Walter Zacharius (pictured), the founder of Kensington Publishing, passed away this week at 87-years-old.

Zacharius started Kensington in 1974. Some of the authors he published included National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates, historical novelist Ken Follett, romance author Fern Michaels, and Tucker Max. In 2004, he realized a life-long dream of becoming a published author with the release of his novel, Songbird (later retitled The Memories We Keep).

Here’s more from Kensington’s tribute to the publisher: “Using his artistic sensibilities, he was the first to introduce ‘special-effect’ foil-stamped, holographic, 3D and moving image book covers into the marketplace. Among his other firsts, Walter started a highly-successful African American publishing imprint (Arabesque Books), created the first Spanish-language romance line, and in 2007 opened a West Coast operation, the headquarters of Kensington Media, LLC. a film production company.”

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Ever wish you could read like a cartoon character? The Lisa Simpson Book Club Tumblr blog has been collecting the many book references made by Lisa on the long running cartoon, The Simpsons.

The inspiring (and funny) reading list collects references to everybody from Danielle Steele to Lillian Hellman to Joyce Carol Oates. Above, we’ve embedded a Scrabble scene from the early days of the cartoon show to illustrate Lisa’s well-read personality.

Here is a particularly funny quote from the show: “Well, I think we should invest in a set of The Great Books Of Western Civilization. Look at this ad from The New Republic For Kids: Each month, a new classic will be delivered to our door. Paradise Regained, Martin Cheselwitt or Herman Melville’s twin-classics Omoo and Typee.”

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The New York Times Book Review has been doing a lot of things right lately—like, for example, giving my friend Robb Forman Dew's Being Polite to Hitler a stellar review—and I'm intrigued this weekend by the trio of short-story collection reviews that have been grouped under the heading "Small Moments."  Here the new collections by Colm Toibin, Charles Baxter, and Edith Pearlman all get their due in essays penned by Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, and Roxana Robinson, respectively.  I particularly love the juxtaposition of these two opening grafs, the first by Prose and the second by Oates:

Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")

Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the “well crafted” short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive “voices” as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot Díaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart” — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)

What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story?  Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means?  Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?
 

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This year’s New Yorker Festival took place last weekend.  Twitter fans at the festival used the hashtag, #tnyfestival.

On Saturday, Joan Acocella (author of the vampire essay, “In the Blood”) moderated the Vampires Revival panel. On board to speak were philosophy professor Noel Carroll, horror novelist Stephen King, vampire film director Matt Reeves, and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. A video preview of the panel discussion is embedded above.

Several dozen King fans waited outside the venue only to be disappointed by King’s unwillingness to sign books. As he walked away with his arms in the air, he told the crowd: “I can’t sign guys, I got to get something to eat.” Alas, just because he’s a “king” doesn’t mean he isn’t human.

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Apologies in advance, but I just had to share this....

As of today the Jesus Storybook Bible, that I illustrated for most of last year, has just hit #26 on the MOVERS AND SHAKERS on amazon.com! It's also currently at a sales rank of 433....

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I haven’t read much of Joyce Carol Oates’ writing for adults, but I’ve quickly become a fan of her YA novels. Her writing is simple but powerful, and I find it hard to put her books down.

I have, in fact, finished this one in the span of about 2 hours.

Francesca, Franky to her friends, is the daughter of a well-known sportscaster and former athlete. On the outside, her family is perfect. They have the perfect house and what appears to be the perfect life.

On the inside, though, things are not so perfect. At a young age, Franky learned not to provoke her father, for fear of his “discipline.” She seems to know that the long sleeves and scarves her mother wears are hiding something, but she’s too afraid to say anything.

A part of Franky emerges that’s not afraid, though; a part Franky has named “Freaky Green Eyes.” And when Franky’s mother disappears, it’s Freaky who finds the courage to act.

It was a quick and compelling read; the emotions are understated, but hit hard. I continue to look forward to JCO’s young adult work.

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