The Picador Book Room

Twenty-five years after his untimely death, the iconic legacy of Sylvester, the “Queen of Disco,” will be resurrected with Mighty Real: Greatest Dance Hits, due out June 25th (international release dates vary) on Fantasy Records. This collection will celebrate the life and music of the artist who once danced his way into the hearts and minds of the disco and LGBT communities. A quarter of a century after his passing, Sylvester will make a fabulous debut back into a prolific time in the LGBT community just the way he would have liked it – through dance music.

Liner notes for the new release written by Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco.

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Alex Ross, The New Yorker music critic and author of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and Listen to This, talks to The Browser about criticism, philosophy, and music in literature. 

There’s a long list of bad examples of vague and gushy writing about music in literature, but there’s also a string of distinguished examples. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple of years ago where I talked about my favourite composers in literature. It makes me very happy when I see a novelist going to the trouble of getting the musical details right, because this is part of the conversation on classical music that we very much need. To have plausible and vivid representations of composers and classical musicians in literature and in film is very important.

FiveBooks Interview: Alex Ross on Writing about Music  

[Photo credit: David Michalek]

theparisreview:

Check out our own Sadie Stein’s Book Notes music playlist for our new anthology, Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, featured on largehearted boy:

“Some Velvet Morning,” Nancy Sinatra

I immediately thought of this song when I first read Leonard Michaels#8217;s “City Boy”; the dreamy quality; the oddness; the undercurrent of suppressed violence.

“Presbyterian Guitar,” John Hartford

If I had to choose one song that, for me, captures the overall feel of the collection, it would be this one, which I still think is the most beautiful rendition.

“Something on Your Mind,” Karen Dalton

The melancholy and eccentricity of Karen Dalton’s voice puts me in mind of the narrator of “Emmy Moore’s Journal”: a woman barely holding onto sanity, but still a strong personality to be reckoned with.

Check out more of the playlist here.

This was a special week at Picador, as our author Hilary Mantel made history by becoming the first woman and the first British person to win the Man Booker Prize twice. Her winning book, Bring Up the Bodies, is certainly on our list of recommendations this week. Congratulations, Hilary!

After realizing that Bring Up the Bodies was the only book that she’d read on the Man Booker shortlist, Alaina immediately picked up Swimming Home by Deborah Levy.

Assistant Editor Elizabeth is making time for Mat Johnson’s Pym in between manuscripts.

James is rereading his favorite entries in Dylan Jones’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music, on-sale October 30 (pre-order from your favorite bookseller!). Here’s Dylan on HALL & OATES:

Even though they made—and occasionally continue to make—some of the best blue-eye soul ever recorded, they had an image problem, with DARYL HALL looking like a market town hairdresser, and JOHN OATES looking like SUPER MARIO’s smaller, uglier brother.

They were a duo, but although it was more than plain what Hall did (sing, a lot, very well), it was never apparent what his partner did. In that respect they were like an American WHAM! Not only that, but whereas some people are born with a sense of how to clothe themselves, and others acquire it, JOHN OATES always looked as if his clothes had been thrust upon him. And whenever he wore something expensive it looked stolen. In essence Hall was the tall, blonde good-looking one who sang all the songs, while Oates was rather short, had a small unnecessary moustache, and hair like badly turned broccoli. Hall looked like the one who had all the fun, whereas Oates had the melancholy appearance of a man who has spent too much time searching for the leak in life’s gas-pipe, with a lighted candle…

Elianna is looking forward to delving deeper into Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (out in paperback next month) and the newly released inaugural issue of The American Reader.

Gabrielle started Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds last night, a book Picador is publishing in paperback this March. She is already more than halfway done and would have finished it if she didn’t have to wake up this morning.

Terry’s work is beyond definition—not something a publicist should openly admit so let me try that again. When Women Were Birds is a poetic love song to family, memory, women, and nature—and everything in between. It’s a slim work, bursting with observation and insight. Devastating and brilliant. I cannot wait to introduce this book to people in paperback.

Finally, Daniel is reading This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diáz. He’s also been listening to a couple of Free Library of Philadelphia’s podcasts. For science fiction fans, this cast with Samuel Delany and Junot is interesting; for Cloud Atlasers and Telegraph Avenuers, here are David Mitchell and Michael Chabon reading and talking about their work.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT begins with an epigraph from the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”

With that in mind, we curated a playlist to be used as a soundtrack to the book. We picked songs that we thought Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell might have been listening to in the early 1980s (pre-1983).

Click play on the cover above for the playlist to launch in your Spotify player.

Let us know what songs you would have added to the list. We’ve added a Spotify Collaborative playlist to our PicadorUSA Spotify account so that you can add your own Marriage Plot picks. Enjoy!

If you don’t have Spotify, the playlist is after the jump.

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(Source: Spotify)

Here at Picador we have more than a few Elvis Presley fans in the office. For the 35^th anniversary of the King’s death we are cranking his tunes and eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

In our forthcoming November book, THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF POPULAR MUSIC author Dylan Jones, editor in chief of British GQ, shares a history of Elvis’s hair:

Teenage is all about hair. Although Elvis Presley’s haircut is considered to be one of the most influential pop icons of the 20^th Century, it was actually copied from Tony Curtis. Presley wore Royl Crown hair products during high school to make his blondish locks appear darker, but it wasn’t until he saw Curtis in the 1949 film, City Across the River, that the singer adopted the greased duck-tail. Dyed blue-black, covered in grease, with truck driver sideburns trailing his cheeks, Elvis finally had his five inches of buttered yak wool.

To middle-class white America, Presley was the devil incarnate, a southern white boy who danced and sang like a black. He was threatening because he was so flagrantly dirty, owning, among other things, the world’s sexiest haircut. His hair was Presley’s trademark, his strength, and an accessory that only added to his animal sexuality.

For those of you still distraught by this nation’s great loss, we suggest you console yourself with Chris Abani’s novel GRACELAND, the story of Elvis Oke, a sixteen-year-old Elvis Presley impersonator who is growing up in the violent, poverty-infested slum of Lagos, Nigeria.

Elvis strolled down to the ferry jetty as a cold wind began to blow. It had been a long day, and between Iddoh Park and Bar Beach he had barely earned enough to get a good meal. It was hard eking out a living as an Elvis impersonator, haunting markets and train stations, as invisible to the commuters or shoppers as a real ghost. This evening he had found himself dancing frantically against the coming abruptness of night, but nobody paid any attention; they all wanted to get home before the darkness brought its particular dangers.

Today we’re listening to our favorites:
Kentucky Rain (David, Senior Editor); Teddy Bear (Darin, Marketing Director); Blue Christmas (Kolt, Managing Editor); Never Been to Spain (Gabrielle, Senior Publicist); Suspicious Minds (Daniel, Marketing Manager); (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care (Justin, Publicist); Can’t Help Falling in Love (Elianna, Associate Publicist)

Reblog this post or comment below and tell us your favorite Elvis song. We’ll add it to the rotation.

The New Guy’s Guide to Picador (Part 3):

This is the final installment of The New Guy’s Guide. From now on I will officially not be the new guy, just a grizzled vet hanging out in the back of the Picador book room. Today, we’ve got the office’s publicity department hitting the stacks hard.

Gabrielle picked two music related titles as her favorites: 

LISTEN TO THIS, by Alex Ross: LISTEN TO THIS, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. The Boston Globe called it “A collection of supremely eloquent essays, addressing a range of subjects from Bach to Björk.”

ROTTEN, by John Lydon: Public Image Limited put out a new album last month so it seems suiting to mention John Lydon’s ROTTEN, his 1993 autobiography. In their review of the book, Rolling Stone called Lydon “A pavement philosopher whose Dickensian roots blossom with Joycean color.” For the latest album they interviewed him. You can read it here.

Justin and Anya both had a soft spot for Sam Lipsyte’s THE ASK. Justin found it “filthy and funny and wonderful and sad.” While Anya noted that Lipsyte “really knows how to turn a phrase and make a most unappealing character utterly compelling.”

Elianna was a last minute entry but came through with this gem.

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES, by Edmund de Waal: This book is uncategorizable. It is a family history that is at once a meditation on preserving the past and a stand against falling too deep into the depths of nostalgia. Wholly unpretentious and deeply earnest, this should be on everyone’s summer, fall, winter, and spring reading lists.

There you have it. Hope you enjoyed these recommendations. Don’t forget to let us know about your favorite Picador book!