Day 237

As I wait for Leslie to arrive for our Friday walk, I can’t help but share my favorite photo & story from Book Expo 2010. This piece running in today’s Shelf Awareness, where you can find lots of ‘enlightened’ news, photos, and information about the world of books, publishers, bookstores, and authors:

The Singing Novelist

Joseph Skibell, author of The Curable Romantic

Algonquin author Joseph Skibell played a whimsical-yet-erudite two-minute song promoting himself and his third novel for a delighted group of librarians who gathered to hear him and his publisher-publicist duo–Elizabeth Charlotte and Michael Taeckens–discuss the route a book follows from inception to publication in a Thursday morning ALA-sponsored panel, “From Writer to Reader.”

Skibell, whose debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, had outstanding reviews but less-so sales, is bringing his third book to market with a stellar endorsement from Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. Algonquin is re-releasing his first novel in trade paperback to coincide with the September 2010 publication date of A Curable Romantic. A scholar and playwright, Skibell’s novels flirt with post-modern magical realism while embracing themes of Jewish mysticism, love, exile, and the search for meaning in tales of modern displacement and yearning.

Skibell’s instrument of choice is a backpacking guitar, and his song was set to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune. The title? “I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major Novelist.”–Laurie Lico Albanese