Quote de jour
Either write something worth reading or do something worthwriting.
~Ben Franklin
To save time uploading, this week's magazine collage is in one image. The resolution suffers as result but the color/design/subtext subtleties are deliciously tongue-in-cheek.


I reluctantly returned last week's short story collection by Deborah Eisenberg to the library largely unread. I may be a reading monster but I can not devour a thousand page book, plus all the others in one week. The few stories I did read nestled into my bones, as did Janet Frame's too close for comfort novel about alienation of expats and writer's block.

That said, I've barely begun to skim this week's selections while my love of flap jacket design grows. See for yourself. If you knew nothing about a book's subject, genre, style, which book would you buy? What attracts you to pull a book off the shelf? We are subtly manipulated to buy products a gazillion times a day. It's no different for books or magazines. Covers sell. Writers are packaged like any product and the successful ones have little choice but to become media whores. The days of writers cocooned in a cozy attic  stringing sentences together are long over. Writing is only a small part of any successfully published writer. PR and the media are a writer's angel and devil. They help sell books, but at what price to a writer's soul?

This is the sublime website Falling Apart in One Piece  for a memoir by Stacy Morrison,Editor-in Chief of Redbook magazine. Simon and Shuster pulls out all the stops. This how best sellers are made.


If you are struggling to be a writer, do yourself and favor and don't read the flap jacket copy of novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. Those three sentences are wrist-slittingly depressing. Everything is beautiful about this book: the writing, the book design, the author's good looks. It's enough to make one green as the peas on the cover. Sigh


As a life-long poor sleeper, I can't wait to stay up half the night with Wide Awake by Patricia Morrisoe.
My favorite funny vulgarian, Chelsea Handler has another smash bestseller. She is a media juggernaut who is building her empire with bigger balls than orangutan, and laughing all the way to the bank. Go Chelsea, Go! Chelsea Handler