Hasidic Writers Read in Crown Heights

This Monday night, I'm reading with some jaw-droppingly vital Hasidic writers in Crown Heights. Please be there. You really aren't going to want to miss this one.

(Just click on the pic, or the related text, to find out details. I think that should work?)

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  A Spotlight On Hasidic Writers

  
  

  Public · By The Creative Soul

Goldbergs, Meet the Goldbergs

My wonderful friend Sarah Lefton wrote me an email the other day:

I just want you to know that although I have no idea what your feelings are on the matter, and you've been either surprisingly (or studiously) publicly quiet about the matter, I am enraged on your behalf about The Goldbergs and have found myself talking about your book an awful lot lately.

So actually, yes, my first novel was called Never Mind the Goldbergs and was a book that was about a TV sitcom. I'm told that it's totally nothing like the new TV show, although, when I first found out about it, I started telling people that they utterly ripped off my book for their background color.

I didn't actually think for one second that ABC used or borrowed or even knew about my book. Really, both of us should be dipping our hats to the original Goldbergs, a radio-and-then-TV series in the 1950s written by and starring Gertrude Berg, who was probably one of the most versatile and amazing people who ever worked on TV. (Primary evidence: It takes major cojones to produce an episode about racism and anti-Jewish sentiment in America...during World War II.) Although, hey, I did give the old TV show a shoutout in my book.

Here's the real bummer of it: Never Mind the Goldbergs did really well last year. It sold out its complete first printing -- which, because it's Scholastic, they'll print tons of copies and just expect them to last forever. But this summer, some friends told me that Amazon had stopped listing the book. I called Scholastic to find out what was up. Apparently they had sold out completely, and they don't see a sufficient need to reprint.

BUT DUDES THERE'S A MAJOR TV SHOW WITH THE SAME FREAKING NAME AS MY BOOK THAT'S ABOUT TO BE ON AND--

I did not write that email to them. I also didn't yell at them when I found out they got rid of the last hundred hardcover copies by selling them for 50 cents each to some random store in the Midwest instead of asking me if I wanted them. I love Scholastic -- I mean, Goldbergs wouldn't be in print if it wasn't for them -- but, yeah. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes you get the bear trap.

On the plus side, I do own the rights to my book again. And my agent is really excited about finding a new publisher. And in the meantime, I have this new book that, if you haven't heard, is doing pretty insanely wonderfully. So I'm in a mostly-good mood. And if you do want to read Goldbergs in the meantime, just email me and I'll send you an ebook of it.

And, if any of you know those people from that other Goldbergs? Feel free to tell them I said hey. And if they ever want to make another series, we can totally reprint it as Never Mind the Goldsteins.

What Rupert Murdoch Means to Me

Today, Forbes ran a really bizarre (and really nice) article about Amplify, the company I make video games for, and my relationship with Rupert Murdoch.

What We Can Learn From Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, And Amplify

...but most of the folks who work at Amplify are left-leaning liberals who wouldn’t do the work if it was about brainwashing kids into Murdoch clones.

Perhaps she wanted me to see her point embodied when she introduced me to Matthue Roth, one of Amplify’s head writers and game developers. I already knew a bit about Roth. His children’s book, My First Kafka, is one of my boys’ favorites. I’ve also read Roth’s novel, Never Mind The Goldbergs–a story about a teenaged girl who finds her foundation for countercultural rebellion in observant Judaism. The novel is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between orthodoxy, individuality, and conformity. Roth’s Amazon author page describes him as “a Hasidic author” and “slam poet,” hardly in resonance with the stereotypical view we may have of the News Corp lemming. (Come to think of it, Roth is hardly in resonance with the stereotypical view we have of anything).

Um, yep. A tremendous blushing and a tremulous shifting in my seat. But my boss just walked over and clapped me on the shoulder, so I am assuming everything is okay.

You can read the whole thing here, if you want to.

Late-Night Storytime

I had the closest thing I'm probably going to get to a Kafka release party at this otherworldly party called Chulent. If you've never heard of Chulent (you can read some New York Times articles about it here and here), it's this late-night gathering of independent-thinking and questioning and rebel Hasidim. A while ago, when I ran away from San Francisco and visited Brooklyn for the summer,* a friend brought me to this midnight barbecue of Hasid-types tossing around Sartre and Kirkegaard in a bombed-out building in the middle of a completely-empty factory district. 

Nine years later, they've graduated to a magnificent crumbling synagogue on Ocean Parkway. There's some Russians drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags and some club kids that speak in fierce Yiddish accents. It's all pretty wonderful.

And at around midnight, we all gathered in a circle in the sanctuary hall and I read them some Kafka.

The remarkable Geo Geller took a series of great pictures (some are here; the rest are on this page). or you can actually listen to the whole reading (with a slideshow). It was the second time I read the book straight through, all three stories, not counting in my kids' bedroom. It was a little bit intense. You can probably hear me breaking up toward  the end of Josefine, which might just be Geo's recording. Yes. Let's chalk it up to that. 

( listen .  photos . kafka )

Kafka in Swedish! Kafka in Romanian!

Brief nuggets of awesomeness. Here is a piece of press about Kafka in Swedish.

Matthue Roth säger att han kan räkna upp miljoner skäl till att han valde att förvandla några av just Kafkas berättelser till en barnbok. Hans nya ”My first Kafka” om ”bland annat gnagare och jätteinsekter är nu omskriven lite varstans, av exempelvis New Yorker-bloggens Kelsey Osgood som gillar bearbetningen och noterar att det inte är något nytt att barn fascineras av otäckheter.

And a longer one in Romanian.

Volumul "Prima mea lectură din Kafka" cuprinde fragmente din trei povestiri ale scriitorului ceh de limbă germană Franz Kafka (1883-1924), pe care autorul american le-a rescris sub formă de versuri – „Metamorfoza”, „Excursie în munţi” şi „Cântăreaţa Josephine”. Versurile lui Roth sunt însoţite de ilustraţiile în alb şi negru ale graficianului Rohan Daniel Eason.  Prima strofă din „Metamorfoza” prezintă  schimbarea prin care trece Gregor Samsa, personajul principal al poemului în proză: „Gregor Samsa urât adesea a visat /Într-o dimineaţǎ s-a trezit/Că într-un gândac s-a transformat”. În 2005, M. Roth a publicat prima lui carte, „Never Mind the Goldbergs”, căreia Librăria Publică din New York i-a oferit titlul de Cea mai bună carte
.

(Goldbergs! They said Goldbergs!)

And Brain Pickings, one of the most gorgeous blogs out there, wrote a lengthy and really complimentary piece about it that talked a warrantedly lot about Rohan's illustrations and called my text "hauntingly beautiful."

And my comic-artist friend Mat just visited, which meant we stayed up late and played games and drew some mini-books, which I'll try to post tomorrow, if I can get them scanned. That's all thanks over and out.

Kafka & Kafka

Somebody just sent me this picture, of My First Kafka and Kafka's first Kafka.

Also, if you haven't seen Rohan's work yet, you really need to. In addition to illustrating Kafka, he's done Wolves of Waverly Place and some simply breathtaking other stuff. (Including a gorgeous book that's out of print and like $100 on Amazon, and I wish I had a copy of it.)

Life after Kafka

It's been a weird run of weeks. My First Kafka is doing amazing. The BBC! The New Yorker! Electric Lit! Google! (Granted, the Google thing was more, well, Kafka himself than the little book that Rohan and I put together, but I'm so not complaining.)

And the same week I got some hugely awful news about a close friend, and some more pretty hugely awful news about my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, going out of print -- this had actually happened back in April, but Scholastic didn't tell me, and they sold all the remaining copies to some Amazon reseller, and the only way I found out was that people kept asking me why it was out of stock. (I still have a bunch of copies on my site store, which you can buy if you want, until they run out, and if they do, I'll just send you a pdf if you ask.) And then I came down with this cold that turned into a cough that didn't go away that, apparently, is pneumonia.

Anyway. it's been pretty wild. Thank you for sticking with me. The fact that I have now appeared on the same network as Doctor Who is really all I've ever asked out of life, and I've got it, and the blessings are flooding in like moldy bread.

And now it's the Three Weeks, this period in Judaism where we mourn for the burning of the Temple, and more crazy stuff is happening. I have a ton to say about it, but most of it's not really relevant -- for actual insightful stuff from an Orthodox perspective, you should totally read Rabbi Fink or Yakov Horowitz. Me, I'm just good for stories, mostly. These days I keep getting a Kafka quote stuck in my head: "The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary." (Granted, it was part of the Talmud a while before Kafka, but who am I to come down on the man for appropriation?)

It's almost two in the morning. I have a head stuffed with snot and a brain stuffed with thoughts that won't quit. But the trees look so nice out my window in the streetlights that they're actually glowing, and Brooklyn doesn't feel like an iron city but an actual place to live, and I'm going to try to sleep for a bit before I have to wake up and make video games. Like I said. I'm blessed. Thank you.

Kafka on the BBC!

I flew out to the far remote borough of Manhattan yesterday to record an interview for the BBC! They did some really cool things with it. I had a super long conversation with one of their producers, completely without knowing that they'd recorded her 7-year-old listening to (and reacting to) our version of "The Metamorphosis" being read.

Here are the oddest things about it:

a) it was in Manhattan, not London;
b) the person interviewing me was in London, and so I ended up talking to an empty chair in a completely empty room;
c) they asked me a line of questions about what my kids thought of the book, and what other kids thought of it, and then they asked a question about how Kafka's feelings about the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to his feelings of isolation. I didn't really answer that one well. Seriously, interviews make me into a deer in the headlights! Which is really odd to say, itself. I'm not used to, you know, saying "interviews" in the plural. Or being on this side of the gun. Err, the microphone.

But the producer was wonderful and Dan Damon, the host, was incredibly nice and gracious, and asked about my other books even though the interview was over and he didn't have to at all. I didn't see the real TARDIS, but I suppose they could always invite me back one day. You can listen to the whole dang thing at this link. For the next week, anyway.

Heeb Magazine + Kafka

The generous folks at Heeb Magazine just put up a review of My First Kafka, and they seem to like it:

[T]here’s a sense of childlike wonder that permeates even the strangest of Kafka’s parables. That’s a tricky proposition to pull off effectively –especially for Roth, who is tasked with the unenviable job of transposing Kafka’s prose into child-sized morsels. Fortunately for weird kids (and their weird parents) everywhere, Roth is more than up to the task, reconstructing three of Kafka’s works into the sort of stories that would fit nicely alongside the Shel Silverstein’s stranger works.

My favorite part is the description of Rohan's illustrations, though: "His ‘Nobodies’ in Kafka’s “Excursion into the Mountains” call to mind Maurice Sendak’s eponymous “Wild Things”, transforming what was originally a passage about Man’s isolation into a whimsical adventure with imaginary friends. Similarly, his Gregor Samsa-bug in “Metamorphosis” is at once monstrous and sympathetic."

Okay. My day is made. Now I'm gonna go and read and stay up all night.

You, on the other hand, can read the review or buy the book (and then stay up all night with me, if you want).

Spoiler Alerts

Three big things which I should tell you about:

First, my new book My First Kafka was officially sent to the printers! That's still a long and complicated process which will take several months. But what it means is, I'm officially off the hook. I'll put up the cover next week (although if you're really curious, you can probably find it posted somewhere). You can also officially preorder it on IndieBound, B&N, and Amazon. If you do, let me know -- I'll sign it when I get a chance. And thank you.



Second: The top-secret project I've been working on has been announced. On the front page of the New York Times, no less. That's about all I can say about that, but go here to read everything you could possibly want (and then Google around for even more).

And third, my colleague, good friend, and occasional couchsurfing host Rob Auten's own game, Gears of War Judgment, is coming out next week! He's been doing a ton of press, but I think this is probably the best interview I've seen. It's also really illuminating in regard to all the stuff I'm still not allowed to say.

Free Stuff! For all of 2013!

Stand back. I'm trying something new.

One way or another you guys have ended up here, reading random stuff that I write, either my books or my movie or my tweets or something else -- and for that, I am incredibly, overwhelmingly grateful. And I have a bunch of stuff I've been working on since Losers happened. My new book (a picture book collaboration with Mr. Rohan Daniel Eason and Mr. Franz Kafka) is coming out this summer, and day-job-wise, I'm working on this top-secret video game thing that you'll hear about as soon as it actually exists.

But I've been feeling like I've lived too much in my head, and not enough time in the actual world, and although I have all this stuff going on, you probably aren't going to see most of it for a long, long while.

So I've decided to throw it out in the world. For free, for however long I can.

I'm going to start releasing things mostly monthly. Starting on the goyishe New Year's Day, on 1/1, then something else on 2/2, up till My First Kafka comes out in the summer, and maybe beyond, if I'm not too insane for it? The first one's going to be a little spoken-word album. Then maybe a Kindle/iBooks/whatever-else-there-is book. Maybe some short stories mixed in. If you have requests, or ideas, or if you've read anything of mine and want to illustrate it or adapt it on YouTube or whatever, please, go wild, go crazy, email me and lend a hand.

I'm still not sure I'll be able to manage this thing! But right now, I really want to. I can't believe some of you found me ten years ago doing a poem that ended up on Broadway, or five years ago in a used bookstore with a neon green cover, or doing some late-night reading on a street or a bar somewhere, and I'm flattered and honored and frankly baffled that you kept in touch.

You're the best. Thank you so much.

Book Deal, Big Deal, Amen

Update: go here to get the actual book!

The deal for my new book, My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, was listed in Publisher's Weekly this week! It's still about a zillion years away from being published (it's a picture book, and we don't even have an artist yet), but I'm excited. I'll let you know when I know anything -- although I don't really know anything at all, yet.

Except that the book is written. I do know that. And I was reading it at 5:00 this morning and getting all sorts of chills, the good kind and the kind that you get when something inhuman is watching you from a dark corner of the room, and I think you'll like it.

Here's the sale notice:

Children's: Picture book
Matthue Roth's MY FIRST KAFKA: RUNAWAYS, RODENTS, AND GIANT BUGS, a charming and delightful - or, at least, an oppressive and unsightly - introduction for precocious children, Goths, and literary nerds, to Robert McGuire at One Peace Books, by Marissa Walsh at FinePrint Literary Management (World).