Month: August 2003

I’m sick as a dog, with an ear infection that took advantage of a 5-day stretch of REALLY pushing myself (magazine, book publicity work, and a friend’s bachelor party in NYC Saturday night; the latter was the final straw). On the plus side, the Bergen Record’s short piece on Voyant is out. I’ll cheer, but not too loudly, because the fever and delirium might trick me into thinking that someone else is wandering around my house:

8/10/03
“Voyant,” a word coined by poet Arthur Rimbaud, is derived from “voyeur,” one who sees, and “savant,” one who knows. But it’s hard for publisher Gil Roth, founder of Ringwood’s Voyant Publishing, to do either when it comes to predicting the public response to the company’s upcoming book: The Immensity of the Here and Now, by novelist Paul West.

“I’m hoping it will get talked about, certainly,” Roth says.

That, at least, seems likely. For one thing, West is a major novelist (The Dry Danube, Rat Man of Paris). For another, his book is about a still-hot topic: 9/11.

Most important, though, is some of the content. “It’s not very politically correct,” Roth says. “It’s full of rage about 9/11.”

It was this sulfurous element that had West bypass his usual publisher and offer a major opportunity for Roth’s one-man operation, which has published four paperback books since it launched in 1998. This is Voyant’s first hardcover book.

The book’s main character loses his memory after the 9/11 attacks; in his sessions with a therapist, he reveals a bile toward radical Islamists that may or may not reach delusional proportions (there are suggestions that the story may be happening in the future, and other world landmarks also have been destroyed). This is the classic “unreliable narrator” that everyone learns about in English Lit 101, but he’s still bound to make some readers uncomfortable.

“This is certainly not a right-wing gun-nut sort of book,” Roth says. “But this character has a lot of rage.”

Roth, also a writer, made at least one seminal contribution to West’s book: urging that West discard his original title, The Topless Towers of Illium (from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus“).

“I told him I thought it sounded like a Trojan strip club,” Roth says.

The Immensity of the Here and Now ($23) will be in bookstores in early September.

E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com

In response to “Tough Crowd,” VM reader Tom Spurgeon writes:

“Don’t you have it exactly backwards? I thought that Camus was in the resistance, and spent a lot of time after the war writing brutal letters and essays indicting the godly institutions for being cowards and supporting Nazi brutality.”

And he’s right! But, at the age of 20 or so, I was a bunch less informed about this sorta thing, operating pretty much on the principle that the French were a bunch of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and so I devalued any philosophy or art that they created.

And so, to my French readers, I say, “Mea culpa!”

Oh, wait: that’s Latin. How does “Mon mauvais!” sound?

Well, anyway, to make it up to France, I’ll post a little slideshow of my trip to Paris from last October when I get home this evening (as a break from stuffing envelopes).

Sorry I haven’t written. Been busy with the magazine, the book, housekeeping, and the barest vestiges of a social life.

Things are mostly squared away with my printer. My rep is trying to get me 5,000 color postcards of the cover as a make-good for messing up on the cost of dust-jackets. I’m a little worried, insofar as I haven’t seen proofs of the book and the jacket yet, but he assured me I’d get them today via FedEx. Keep your fingers crossed.

Got interviewed by the Bergen Record last night for a short piece in the Sunday paper. My first author, Vince Czyz, recently returned from his former life in Istanbul, and has helped out like gangbusters on the publicity for this book (and Voyant in general). I’ve never been great about publicizing things, which is my biggest flaw as a publisher. I hope.

During my several trips to NYC last weekend, I stopped in on several bookstores (St. Mark’s, Shakespeare & Co., Coliseum and Gotham Book Mart), all of which seemed impressed by the flyer for Immensity. Many thanks to cover designer Sang Lee for coming up with an image that can do a lot of my publicizing for me. Speaking of which, I’ll be labeling, stuffing, stamping and sealing 400 or so envelopes tonight to send off to independent bookstores throughout the country.

Anyway, columnist Jim Beckerman conducted a 15-minute interview for the paper, which gets pretty good circulation in the NJ/NY area. I prefer the Newark Star Ledger‘s sports section over the Record‘s, but hey. When the column comes out, I’ll post a link. No photos of your humble, non-publicizing publisher, fortunately.

I spent last Sunday in the company of my web designer, John Castro, and we spent nearly eight hours upgrading the Voyant site [now defunct].

John and I talked extensively that evening, at the Karma Kafe in Hoboken, which I mistakenly assumed was actually a cafe. Turned out to be a little south Asian restaurant. We had coffee anyway, and discussed some of the more subtly destructive psychological problems I’ve been having since 9.11.

Oh, also: a few days ago, I discovered the second greatest invention in man’s history, following the iPod: