Good News for Boise State’s Idaho Review and Denver Music Writer Steve Knopper

By Jenny Shank, 11-11-09

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.” I asked Knopper via email if the movie is going to be a documentary, and he said that the screenplay, written by Victoria Stewart, will be a feature film, “with actors playing the roles of the real people in the book.” Last week on his blog, Knopper wrote:

“A lot of people have asked how this came to pass. It’s pretty simple. Bob Cooper, a veteran producer who has worked on American Beauty and Barbarians at the Gate and now oversees Landscape Entertainment, called me one day and said he really liked the humor in the book. Which was great in itself. Then he said he wanted to option the rights to HBO, and six months later, I got an actual check of real money. The screenwriter is award-winning playwright Victoria Stewart, and word on the street is the working draft focuses on certain Sony Music executives mentioned prominently in the early chapters. I would say more, but I don’t want Bob or Tory to send their Hollywood goons to my door.”

• Central-Oregon native Benjamin Percy has a funny and informative pep-talk for writers in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers called “Go the Distance: What Rocky Taught Me About Submission” (not online, so head to the bookstore, folks).  Percy uses Rocky as inspiration for writing and submitting his stories despite repeated rejection:

“A framed poster of a black-eyed Stallone hangs above my desk.  The blaring trumpets of the Rocky theme song sound every time my cell phone rings.  He hovers over my shoulder like a ghost, whispering in my ear, ‘You stop this fight, I’ll kill ya.’”

Percy recounts how he almost gave up on his story “In the Rough” after receiving 39 rejections, but then it was accepted by the Antioch Review and ended up listed as one of the “100 Distinguished Stories” of the year in The Best American Short Stories 2008.

• This is just funny: Last week The Los Angeles Times’ book blog Jacket Copy interviewed Dwight Garner, author of Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements (HarperCollins, $26.99) (Via Twitter.com/MaudNewton).  Included as an illustration was this vintage Random House ad for Cormac McCarthy, whose floating head kind of looks like a smart-alecky sidekick to Wally and the Beav.  Garner researched the ads in the archives of the New York Times, where he has been a book critic for many years, as well as the archives of other papers.  Garner mentioned this misguided ad in response to Carolyn Kellogg’s question, “Were there any ads that you included that struck you as doing a particularly fantastic or terrible job of representing the book?”:

“It’s one of my favorite ads the book, but I think it does a pretty bad job of representing the book – a 1968 ad for Cormac McCarthy’s novel Outer Dark. There’s Cormac McCarthy in the ad; he looks as studly as a major-league third baseman. The blurbs from the critics are very bland – “competent, brilliant, responsible,” “rich with life’s substance” – what the ad doesn’t tell you is this book is, at least in part, about a woman who abandons her baby out in the woods. It’s an extremely, extremely dark book. This ad, as charming as it is, is not letting readers know exactly what they’re in for when they pick up this book by Cormac McCarthy.”

• And this isn’t such good news, but it had a positive outcome: Publisher’s Weekly recently announced its editors’ choices for the ten best books of 2009, and did not include a single title written by a woman among the list.  This caused a furor in all sorts of places across the Internet, summarized here in Laura Miller’s article for Salon.com.  As Miller writes, “the fledging feminist literary organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) set up a wiki page inviting visitors to add titles to a list of ‘great books by women’ published in 2009.”

I’ve read plenty of commendable books written by women this year, so I added to the page Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human, Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, Antonya Nelson’s Nothing Right, and Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us.

I’m already thinking about my annual Best of the West books list, but I’m going to wait until December to run it.

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