The Picador Book Room

Consider this pre-Thanksgiving edition of Friday Reads to be an appetizer, if you will.

During the Hurricane Sandy reprieve Justin compulsively watched two seasons of Dr. Who. In that spirit he’ll be picking up Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe for the weekend.

Having finished How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff, one of the forthcoming May 2013 books in Picador’s School of Life series, Gabrielle has moved on to its accompanying title, How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric.

Krznaric’s book is “a guide for helping you take your working life in new directions, and for bringing your career and who you are in closer alignment.” While I already find my work fulfilling, I’m loving the bits of social history mixed throughout. For instance, Krznaric says, “Although the search for a fulfilling career has only become a widespread aspiration in the West since the end of the Second World War, it has its roots in the rise of individualism in Renaissance Europe.”

When I leave work today the chapter “A Short History of Career Confusion” is waiting for me.

Both Alaina and Elianna have the ARC of Anna Stothard’s Orange Prize Longlisted novel The Pink Hotel on tap for the holiday week. The book will be released as a paperback original in April of next year.

Alaina: I’ve only just gotten started on the book, but I recommend this extremely entertaining essay by Stothard in the Daily Mail, in which she discovers that one her childhood literary idols was actually her mother’s lover.

Darin is reading Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, purchased on impulse because of the new cover! And in preparation for our sales conference, Little Century by Anna Keesey.

After taking a week off, the Picador team is back with some Friday Reads recommendations for you. It appears that Hurricane Sandy put nearly all of us in a non-fiction mood this week…

Gabrielle is reading How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff, one of the books in Picador’s new School of Life series, due out in the US in May.

Daniel is reading Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy edited by Alan Licht and published by W.W. Norton in the US. 

While not a recluse, Will Oldham does not have a history of being forthcoming in interviews. This book gives him the opportunity to talk about his work with Alan Licht, his friend and touring mate. That makes the conversation insightful, funny, and a must-read for any fan of the man or the myth.

The end-of-days weather of last week put Elizabeth in the mood to re-read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

Highly recommend, partly because of the excellent chapter on New York City (with focus on its subway system).

James is reading the 42 page afterword to the new, updated edition of Tom Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, on sale December 11.

P.J. will be reading Kurt Anderson’s Heyday.

It has been filling up my Twitter feed lately, and therefore my dreams.

Darin is working on a The Scientists: A Family Romance by Marco Roth, which Picador will launch on Monday for paperback publication next fall.

Justin, bucking the nonfiction trend, is reading Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris, one volume of his twenty novel cycle about Paris in the late 1700s.

It’s amazingly evocative of that time and place (specifically Les Halles, the then-new, now-demolished center of food for the entire city). I’ve got four more on my shelf now, waiting to be read.

Alaina just finished Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill.

I’m not one to pick up plays for pleasure very often, but when you’re trapped on Long Island during a hurricane and you’ve finished the only book you brought along, the books on your host’s shelf all begin to look extremely appealing. That said, this book surprised me. O’Neill portrays a drug and alcohol-addicted family undergoing a complete breakdown with precision— perhaps because the play is at least partly autobiographical. Definitely recommend.

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.

It’s time for the Picador crew’s Friday Reads,

James is digging back in to Dylan Jones’s The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music now that finished copies have arrived.

Reading some entries I didn’t get to the first time around. A new highlight, his entry on MEATLOAF: “There are so many Meatloaf records that do the job they were employed to do (defining every minute of the arc of a paaarty), yet few of them rival Bat Out Of Hell, an album that demands to be listened to in a speeding car, driven by your designated driver, in the early hours of the morning, on the way home from a country ball, as you lie slumped in the back seat, your tuxedo covered in cold sweat, cheap red wine, and the lipstick of someone else’s woman.”

Daniel is reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Ruin of Amalfitano, Ben Lerner’s piece on the demise high school debate from the latest issue of Harper’s and finishing up The Unquiet Grave.

Darin is reading The Heart Broke In by James Meek from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 

Wonderful and totally engaging.  A moving, sometimes funny family saga, but epic in scope and deeply profound in the questions it poses about how we find meaning in our lives.

I’m also reading Field of Blood by Denise Mina,a crime story set in early 80s Scotland. Excellent characterization, an original protagonist, grizzly crime, and a dark sensibility.  I’m sold and will be reading more from Mina.

After last night’s book launch for Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, a panel discussion that included author Donald Antrim, contributor David Means, and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, Gabrielle is fast-tracking Antrim’s novel The Hundred Brothers to the top of her reading list and taking it home tonight.

It was a tough call between (finally) reading Antrim (possibly the last of the Picadorians to do so) and checking out Jonathan Franzen’s latest essay collection, Farther Away, which we’ll be publishing next year in paperback. There was a great write-up of the book on The Smart Set and once again, decisions, decisions.

Still working through her stack of FSG Paperback Originals, Alaina has gotten around to John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, a collection of essays that was published last year.

I’m trying to expand my literary horizons by reading things I typically wouldn’t — in this case, a collection of essays. Pulphead is a fantastic introduction to what a collection of this kind can do. Even though I’m only a few essays in, I feel confident saying that this particular literary exploration has gone very, very well.

Here’s what team Picador is reading on this dreary, rainy Friday…

Daniel is reading about all the big ideas in The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly, an English critic and writer. If that isn’t enough to persuade you, Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh were devotees of his work.

Justin is reading Steve Martin’s third novel, An Object of Beauty, about the New York art scene. At one point, during an auction at Sotheby’s, the main character storms out of the room:

Elianna is looking forward to spending this rainy evening finishing Paul Auster’s Winter Journal in preparation for his appearance at LIVE from the NYPL on Monday. She’s also been enjoying the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, purchased from the New Directions booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend.

Picador’s managing editor Kolt, in true managing editor fashion, just received a copy of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and promptly spent 10 minutes waxing poetic about the cover treatment (it is stunning). He’s excited to start reading it this weekend.

Senior Editor David just sent Gabrielle a manuscript to check out over the weekend so that’s what she’ll be reading come 5pm…

…because contrary to popular belief, we do not get to read books all day. Currently, however, I’m reading Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of pieces from her advice column, Dear Sugar, that ran on The Rumpus. It’s not something I would normally read on my own but McNally Jackson picked it for their essay book club and I have to say, it’s pretty great. Strayed is a talented writer and an advice columnist for a new generation.

Lastly, Alaina has been spent the week reading People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry, the true story of Lucie Blackman, a 21 year old British bar hostess who went missing in Tokyo in the summer of 2000.

I’m not typically a reader of non-fiction or true crime books, but I had my nose in this book every spare minute of the past four days. Parry’s portrayal of both Lucie and her accused murder, Joji Obara, is intensely detailed, in a way that makes you desperate to keep reading. (Note: For some insight into just how creepy this book is, Better Book Titles renamed it “A Great Way to Prove You’re Not Crazy is to Show the Cops Your Dead Frozen Dog for No Reason.”)

I was so impressed with this book that I’ve got another Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback original packed in my bag for the weekend — Threats by Amelia Gray.

It’s a short but interesting list of Friday Reads recommendations from the Picador team this week.

Gabrielle is delaying the inevitable by reading the last pages of culture critic Daniel Mendelsohn’s forthcoming essay collection Waiting for the Barbarians very slowly.

I really could go on forever about how amazing his essays are in general—and this collection specifically—but I will spare you all. Just know that no one puts to use a formal education in the classics when writing about Mad Men, Avatar, and theater productions of Spider-Man quite like Mendelsohn.

And, because Picadorians are natural book-jugglers, I just started Aifric Campbell’s On The Floor, a financial thriller Picador is publishing in 2013. The writing is totally solid and the story had me stuck to my couch for a good few hours last night. I can imagine there will be some excitement in the halls here once it goes out onto the US streets.

Elianna is very much looking forward to reading The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. (She’s also feeling slightly curious what all the hoo ha is all about with Naomi Wolf’s new book…)

Justin is skimming Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies and adding the best of the best to his Netflix queue.

PJ just finished The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (“It was hilarious!”) and has a pile of submissions to tackle this weekend.

Similarly, Stephen is buried under a pile of manuscripts in the run up to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Lastly, Alaina finally succumbed to her roommate’s prodding to read How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran.

I’ve only just started, but the book already has me hooked with its opening premise that womanhood is something foisted upon young women without a handbook or instruction on how to actually be a woman. Looking forward to delving deeper over the weekend.

What is the Picador team reading this upcoming weekend?

Darin just finished Martin Amis’s newest book, Lionel Asbo, calling it “great fun!”

James is reading Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by journalist/historian Nick Turse, which Metropolitan Books will publish in January.

A tremendously well-sourced (90 pages of endnotes! 10 years of poring over government documents!) that shows conclusively that incidents like the My Lai massacre were not isolated incidents. An important book.

PJ has a “super happy book weekend” ahead, with both Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by James Lasdun, due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February 2013 and Santatango by László Krasznahorkai on his to-read list.

Gabrielle is just finishing up Karaoke Culture from last week and is looking forward to sorting through her stacks of Picador and non-Picador books to find her next read. In the meantime, she highly recommends Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay on why he became a critic and what criticism means to him.

There are so many words of wisdom in this essay but here’s a bit to give you an idea:

The serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader—a consideration that brings you to the question of what ought to be reviewed in the first place. When you write criticism about literature or any other subject, you’re writing for literature or that subject, even more than you’re writing for your reader: you’re adding to the accumulated sum of things that have been said about your subject over the years. If the subject is an interesting one, that’s a worthy project. Because the serious literary critic (or dance critic, or music critic) loves his subject above anything else, he will review, either negatively or positively, those works of literature or dance or music—high and low, rarefied and popular, celebrated and neglected—that he finds worthy of examination, analysis, and interpretation. To set interesting works before intelligent audiences does honor to the subject. If you only write about what you think people are interested in, you fail your subject—and fail your reader, too, who may in the end find himself happy to encounter something he wouldn’t have chosen for himself.

Creative Director Henry is reading Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students by Ellen Lupton.

This is one of the best books on the complexities and joys of designing with letterforms. I read it for inspiration, and then use that inspiration to help me with teaching my typography class at the School of Visual Arts.

Justin is re-reading Michael Kimball’s Big Ray ’cause its AMAZING.

Daniel is reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. In it, she gives some instructive advice, which he tried at his desk (it worked).

If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.

If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.

Here we are, in our first post-summer Friday. Here’s what the Picador team is diving into this weekend. Happy reading!

Alaina is continuing to cull the backlist shelves of the book room, and this time she came up with Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind.

The book tells the story of two very different women who are college roommates at Barnard in the late 1960s. When one of them discovers, years after their friendship has ended, that the other has been convicted of a violent crime, she looks back at their shared history and comes to a certain understanding of the woman’s place in her life, in spite of their separation. I’m waiting to get further into this one to make judgment, but so far Nunez has proven masterful at portraying female friendship.

A sucker for a good pop culture essay, Gabrielle is reading Dubravka Ugresic’s collection Karaoke Culture.

At first I was concerned that the book would be all about karaoke but as it turns out, Ugresic uses it as a metaphor to explore politics and the arts. So far, it’s a lot of fun.

PJ is reading Gig, a collection of short stories about the ins and outs of people’s jobs.

It is simply a collection of people with disparate jobs talking about what said jobs are like, giving various anecdotes. Surprisingly, ones like “systems administrator” have been more fascinating than “sex worker” or “drug dealer.” Also, like much of the world I’m sure, I’m reading the new DFW biography.

Elizabeth snagged a copy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s upcoming title, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, a story of a “bookstore that’s more than a bookstore.” (That jacket is pretty awesome, as well.)

Justin is reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

On living in his neighborhood in New Jersey: “Perfect Babbitts, really, all of us, even though to some extent we understood that.”

Kolt is working on Hanna Pylväinen’s debut, We Sinners. Each chapter is told by one of the nine Rovaniemi children, as they come of age in the extremely strict Laestadian church.

“Oy vey! Life’s too short for bad matzoh ball soup!” Read this book.

It’s Labor Day Weekend at last! Here’s what the Picador team will be reading over the long weekend.

Daniel is enjoying The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar, out next week in paperback. He also read a couple of author interviews: The Believer’s interview with Richard Price and The Paris Review’s conversation with Nicholson Baker.

PJ is taking along Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping on what is sure to be a long, traffic-ridden drive up the coast this weekend.

Alaina stumbled across a copy of Alexander Chee’s elegant and heartbreaking Edinburgh on the Picador backlist shelves earlier this week and has been quietly devastated ever since.

Gabrielle is continuing her education in noir and is almost finished with Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open, the first book in his 1980s Factory Series.

I love the British slang and the dark places the detective goes while trying to solve a gruesome murder. Great characters in this one.

Once I finish with it, which should be today or tomorrow, I snagged a copy of humorist Alan Bennett’s memoir Writing Home from the Picador bookroom after hearing a rebroadcast of an interview he did in 1995 with CBC Radio.

Stephen is reading another future Picador title: Aifric Campbell’s completely absorbing novel cum financial thriller On the Floor.

Set in the late 80s as brilliant young men and women from modest backgrounds broke into the high flying ranks of international finance, the novel follows Geri Molloy, a whipsmart, self-destructive young Irish woman on the make who must weigh her huge ambitions against the personal costs they will exact for her to achieve them. Picador will publish the book next summer, and it will definitely appeal to readers of Michael Lewis and Bryan Burrough in its thrilling insider perspective on the world of high finance, with a gripping plot and an appealing, flawed heroine at its core.

Elizabeth just got a copy of Portrait of a Novel, Michael Gorra’s new biography of Henry James.

The book approaches “The Master” by retelling the story behind Portrait of a Lady, one of his many masterpieces. I am so excited about it, although I will probably wait till the winter holidays to really dive into it—this is something I want to savor.

James is catching up with a Picador backlist title he’s never read: The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s debut novel (1988).

It’s the last Friday before Labor Day weekend — if you haven’t decided what to read over the holiday, we’ve got a few ideas for you.

Gabrielle is currently reading More Baths Less Talking, the latest collection of Nick Hornby’s book columns featured in the Believer.

As someone who writes press releases for work and blogs about books, I love to read book reviews and anything that gives hints into the nonfiction writing process. Nick Hornby’s writing on books is amazing and there will be a full review on my site in the near future (gratuitous plug: www.thecontextuallife.com) but in the meantime, it was great to see Picador books on his reading list (Lowboy by John Wray) and to read this: “If your commitment to the canon means you’ve never had time for Marilynne Robinson … then I would argue that you’re not as cultured as you think.”  

James is reading When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood.

In a state with towns named China, Paris, Norway, South Paris, and Peru, Mexico still stands out. I grew up in Rumford, directly across the river from Mexico, and I know this remote, blue-collar part of Maine well. Wood captures it better than anyone I’ve read, with honesty and with love.

Daniel is celebrating himself and Walt Whitman by reading Laws for Creations, a collection of selected poems and prose from the great bearded one (edited by Michael Cunningham). 

If I had read Whitman in high school, my senior quote might have been “Only what proves itself to every man and every woman is so, / Only what nobody denies is so.”

NYRB Classics put out a beautiful edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal. Elianna has been unable to shake this passage:

“We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us. Might not a bellows assist us to breathe? That our breathing should create a wind in a calm day! We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.”

Stephen is still stuck out of the office, with time to read…

So very much enjoyed The Pink Hotel, the Orange Prize Longlisted novel by Anna Stothard that Picador will be publishing next summer. It captures the grit and lost souls of the city of angels as - in the weeks after her longlost mother’s untimely death - a young British woman travels the city in search of the men with whom her mother was in love.

Alaina has just started Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère, the deeply emotional memoir of his experience in Sri Lanka at the time of the 2004 tsunami, among other things. (The book will be available in paperback September 4.)

With summer slowly drawing to a close, the Picador team is cramming in as much last minute reading as possible. Check out our slew of picks for this week:

It’s been planes, trains and automobiles for our publisher Stephen this week:

Have been out of the office on and off and will continue to have to be for the weeks ahead, with much down time for reading…

Last week I was on a one hour plane flight and I sped through the hugely enjoyable and incredibly funny The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett - in which the Queen of England discovers just how much she enjoys the pleasures of books. Sharp, clever and with so much wisdom and heart, I was laughing so hard that I literally had tears streaming down my face. Once we landed, both of my neighboring seat mates wanted to know what I was reading as they wanted to go out and buy it for themselves. The catharsis of a great laugh is priceless.

On the way back home, a four hour bus ride stretched into eight hours of northeast coast weekend traffic and became the perfect bubble of time to sink into - and make headway with - David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Wondrous. Just finished it this morning - an incredible feat of imagination, scope and creation.

Next up: Anna Stothard’s Orange Prize longlisted novel The Pink Hotel, that we’ll be publishing stateside next summer at Picador.

Elianna has been closely following the Pussy Riot trial, which came to a close today:

The three members of Russia’s Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for so-called “hooliganism.” Their closing statements in n+1 during what has been a rather Kafkaesque trial are well worth reading.

[From Maria Alyokhina’s closing statement]:

“Because all you can deprive me of is “so-called” freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia. But nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to openness [glasnost], when this will be read and heard by thousands of people. This freedom goes on living with every person who is not indifferent, who hears us in this country. With everyone who found shards of the trial in themselves, like in previous times they found them in Franz Kafka and Guy Debord. I believe that I have honesty and openness, I thirst for the truth; and these things will make all of us just a little bit more free. We will see this yet.”

Elizabeth has just finished Pins & Needles by Karen Brown.

Also submissions. Also stuff about hooliganism, which I did not realize was an actual criminal term. Should I have realized it was an actual criminal term? Tumblr-verse, your thoughts are welcome. 

Justin is reading Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York:

In the 30s, Mumford chronicled the boom in New York architecture for the New Yorker in his column, “The Sky Line,” collected here. His criticism is as fresh and prescient as ever. Here, a quote on the unintended consequences of the then unbuilt Radio City site plan: “If Radio City, as now forecast, is the best that could be done, there is not the faintest reason for anyone to attempt to assemble a big site. Chaos does not have to be planned.” Atlantic Yards, anyone?

Galleys for Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge just arrived in the office. Alaina, always a sucker for a really good, really creepy story, picked one up immediately. The book won’t go on sale until February 2013, but you can check out The Hotel Iris to tide you over until then.

Gabrielle is getting ready for her fall books. Right now she’s reading André Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere and particularly likes the passages on writing:

I write to give my life a form, a narrative, a chronology; and, for good measure, I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lusterless. I write to reach out to the real world, though I know that I write to stay away from a world that is still too real and never as provisional or ambivalent as I’d like it to be. In the end it’s no longer, and perhaps never was, the world that I like, but writing about it. I write to find out who I am; I write to give myself the slip.

Finally, Darin is reading Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, as we begin our preparations to publish it in paperback next spring.

Welcome to the first Friday of August. As summer starts to wind down, our team has recommendations on how to make the most of these last weeks of summer reading.

On her last Friday in the Picador offices, intern Anya has just started Little Century, Anna Keesey’s debut, recently released from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Both Daniel and P.J. have Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station as their read this week. P.J. recently finished it, and describes it as, “a book about a young American a’ramblin’ and a’wanderin’ around Madrid, sort of writing an epic poem.” Daniel is only 100 pages in, but this passage in particular struck him:

And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and when I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

Alaina just finished Blame by Michelle Huneven, on Jennifer Weiner’s recommendation. She is just getting around to some of her galleys from BookExpo of America, and has plans to pick up One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper next.

Darin is enthralled by FSG’s All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen, a group biography of Esther Murphy, Merceds de Acosta, and Madge Garland. 

High society, fashion, and old school lesbianism: these are a few of my favorite things.

Justin is working on Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Gabrielle just finished Christopher Beha’s debut novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder. She says:

It was enjoyable to read not only for its excellent writing but also because it made me think about life’s big issues: family, death, and faith. Christopher will be in conversation with Picador author Garret Keizer on Tuesday, August 21^st at McNally Jackson to discuss Garret’s his latest book, Privacy. All in the area are invited. It’s going to be great—and lots of us Picadorians will be there. We’re fun.

This morning, I started Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I have a serious blind spot when it comes to noir and need to correct it ASAP. I foresee lots of cigarettes, whiskey, and gunshot wounds in my future.

Stephen called Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins the “perfect summer read: absorbing, funny, stylish.”

And lastly, James recommends the “uncommonly honest” interview of Bret Easton Ellis in the Spring 2012 edition of The Paris Review.

Time for another round of Team Picador’s Friday Reads.

This week, Gabrielle is reading Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley, part of Melville House’s The Art of the Novella series.

It is a totally adorable story about a middle-aged woman who lives with her brother on a farm. Her brother, after writing a critically acclaimed novel, starts to neglect his duties. His sister has pretty much had it with him when one day a man comes by with a mobile bookstore—a horse-drawn covered wagon—wanting to sell the operation to her brother, a writer he admires. Instead, to save the farm (and her sanity), the sister buys the wagon and takes off to sell books on her own. I’ve absolutely fallen in love with this feisty woman and am having so much fun reading about her adventures as a traveling book peddler. Highly recommended.

In the interest of full disclosure, Alaina admits that she still isn’t quite done with Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. However, with a road trip on the agenda for this weekend, finishing the book in the car is inevitable, and she’s got Sabina Berman’s debut novel, Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World stowed away in her bag. 

The editor who talked about this title at Picador’s spring launch meeting earlier this week spoke so passionately about the unique and quirky voice of the book’s autistic protagonist, Karen Nieto, that I couldn’t help but snag a copy of the hardcover as soon as it came into the office. The book will be available from Henry Holt next month.

Darin has an interesting pair of books this week: Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron and Skios by Michael Frayn.

Daniel is 60 pages into How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty, another future Picador paperback launched at this week’s spring launch meeting.

It’s the true story of building a humanoid robot in the image of Phillip K. Dick. It’s interesting so far. While I was reading it I was curious to see how lifelike David Hanson, the roboticist, could make the humanoid faces. The answer: very lifelike. Hanson’s Ted Talk below.

James is reading another future Picador paperback (coming in February 2013), The Disciple of Las Vegas by Ian Hamilton, because, “Who couldn’t love a Chinese-Canadian lesbian forensic accountant?”

Intern Anya is busy reading multiple submissions, but still plans to make time this weekend for Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.

Finally, Justin is reading Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Tinkers by Paul Harding.

Welcome to the end of the week! Here’s what Team Picador is reading this Friday the 13th…

Publisher Stephen is reading Augusten Burroughs’ This is How, which will be published as a Picador paperback in 2013.

Likely the most refreshing, honest “self help” book I’ve ever read, though it is a lot more than just “self help”, filled with Augusten’s trademark wit and bold humor. 

At the insistent prodding of a well-meaning friend, Alaina is reading Dave Eggers’ debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At only 50 pages in, she is not quite ready to say whether the book is appropriately titled or not, though she is enjoying it so far.

Daniel is still brushing up on his Picador backlist, this week with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.

Almost every sentence in Train Dreams has some turn of phrase, some strange or striking element that gives me a moment of pause. This passage about Robert Grainier’s, the protagonist, body getting old and getting hurt after a career of culling spruce in the northwestern US lumber yards makes my bones ache:

“His joints went to pieces. If he reached the wrong way behind him, his right shoulder locked up dead as a vault door until somebody freed it by putting a foot against his ribs and pulling on his arm. It take a great much of pulling,” he’d explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more that that–pull harder–a great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to pull …” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp.”

Justin is currently between books, but he just finished up Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, which is a bit of a cult favorite here in the Picador office.

James and Elizabeth are both reading top-secret manuscript submissions. We’ve definitely got some exciting things on tap for the future.

Gabrielle is pulling double duty as usual:

I’m just finishing up an unexpected (to me) funny read, Dublinesque by contemporary Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas. The main character, Riba, is a failed book publisher who sets out for Dublin with a group of friends to eulogize the printed word. Obviously, this strikes a chord.

I’m also reading, and rereading, Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Story, a book we’re publishing in October. When compiling the collection, The Paris Review asked contemporary writers—Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Lydia Davis, etc.—to choose their favorite short story from the magazine’s archive and write an intro to it. Their setups are excellent companions to the stories that follow, showing you what to look for and how to read it. I can’t wait to see this one on bookstore tables—the cover is an incredible display of typewriter fetishism. 

Happy Friday [Reads], all!

Picador’s newest team member, Daniel, is at work on a couple of books this week:

The Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake – Funny name, amazing writer. He published six stories in magazines, mostly The Atlantic Monthly, before committing suicide in 1979. Today would have been his 60th birthday. The stories are all based in West Virginia and are filled with yearning and heartbreak. He’s been called the “Ishmael of Appalachia.” I try to read this every couple of years.

Highlight from the first (and best) story “Trilobites:”

I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: “We will live on mangoes and love.” And she up and left without me—two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.

Winter Journal by Paul Auster – Paul Auster’s memoir retracing his sixty–three years. Really enjoying this so far.

Where he got me:

Eyes and ears, head and neck, shoulders and back, arms and legs, throat and stomach, ankles and feet, not to mention the enormous boil that once sprouted on the left cheek of your ass, referred to by the doctor as a wen, which to your ears sounded like some medieval affliction and prevented you from sitting in chairs for a week.

Gabrielle is finishing up Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a strange novel by Gilbert Sorrentino.

It’s a satirical look at the New York art and literary scene of the 1950s and ‘60s. There are so many layers to it your brain does backflips. Needless to say, highly recommended for anyone into experimental fiction.

Justin is still reading Teju Cole’s Open City, in addition to catching up on his newly-arrived July periodicals, including GQ and Poetry Magazine.

Alaina was gifted a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver for her birthday earlier this week, and is taking it slow — just a couple of stories each morning on the commute into work. Additionally, The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman has proved a beautiful read so far.

Darin’s got Michael Frayn’s newest, Skios, as well as Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? He also admits that he is still working on The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, one of his picks last week, which he says is “wonderful” so far.

Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition has distracted Elizabeth from her pile of submissions for the moment, at least.