THE LAST SAMURAI : Events

For those in or near New York, the following events have been planned to mark the reissue of The Last Samurai:

Saturday July 30 7:30 pm

Helen DeWitt and Timo Andres,
THE LAST SAMURAI, an evening of music and reading
Tickets $20

National Sawdust
80 N 6th Street
Brooklyn, NY
11249


Sunday July 31 5pm and 9pm

Screenings of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai with brief introduction by Helen DeWitt,
book signing after 5pm showing

The Metrograph
6 Ludlow Street
New York, NY


Tuesday August 2 7:00 pm
Reading, book signing, PARTY!!!

Community Bookstore
143 7th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215

Hope to see you if you're in town!

I will also be visiting various bookstores to sign copies of the new edition of The Last Samurai; the schedule is roughly as follows:

Monday August 1, NYC

2 pm -- Posman's Books, Chelsea Market

2: 30 pm -- 192 Books

3 pm -- The Strand

3:30 pm -- Three Lives 

4 pm -- McNally Jackson 

Tuesday August 2,  Brooklyn 

Afternoon -- Greenlight Bookstore

6 pm -- Community Bookstore (see above) 

If any other bookstores feel they have been overlooked and would like me to drop by, please contact the New Directions publicist, Mieke Chew (mchew@ndbooks.com).

Publicist says I have NOT committed professional suicide

Profile in New York Magazine by Christian Lorentzen, here.

Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum on HuffPo

The Last Samurai did have a somewhat storm-tossed passage to publication.  It's possible if the Internet had flourished in something like its current form things would have gone better.  Back in the day, if Tina Brown was tight with Hillary Clinton, a party for Clinton's New York Senate victory could bump the launch party for the book back to a point when the author was no longer capable of public appearances.  Publicity involved dragging the authorial body here and there so that sentences could emerge from the authorial mouth.  And the events had to be set up by a publicist competing for scarce public space.  So if the author cracked up after the oft-deferred launch party and disappeared, if the publicist was in a miff, people who were excited about the book couldn't set up more congenial ways to talk about it. Couldn't unilaterally find venues independent of the whims of the publicist.

Anyhoo, the whole thing here.

My first time: Paris Review video interview series

The Paris Review has commissioned a series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book.  Tom Bean and Luke Poling came up to my cottage in Vermont back in March to talk to me about The Last Samurai; the video is now up here.

The Last Samurai reissue, news of the day

Over on LitHub, 7 booksellers talk about how to hand-sell The Last Samurai.  If you are not a bookseller you are probably not looking for tips on how to hand-sell The Last Samurai or, indeed, any other book, but -- what's appealing is to have something we so rarely see, a round-up of different responses to a book.  The convention of our review papers is that a book is handed over to a single reviewer; you might get different takes on a book if it is lucky enough to be reviewed in several papers, but for the most part we're invited to collude in the fiction of the magisterial assessment.  We all know, of course, that different readers may have radically different responses to a book, but we rarely see this on display in one place in the literary press.

Note: A big round of applause to Mieke Chew, the publicist at New Directions who came up with this brilliant idea.  

The whole thing here:

http://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/

Tufte in R

Amazing resource from Lukasz Piwek, here.

podcast with Scott Gosnell

Scott interviewed me a couple of weeks ago via Skype and courteously sent me the edited podcast before sending it out.  It's embarrassingly clear that one of us needs media coaching, and it isn't Scott. To the untutored ear, I seem to have challenged myself to say 'you know' as many times as possible in the shortest possible time.  (This, unfortunately, can't be fixed by judicious editing.)  Also, being somewhat unnerved by all this real-time verbal interaction, I at one point search for the German term for café au lait and the hapless mind serves up Kremkaffee, when it is, of course, Milchkaffee.

At various points in the interview I can be heard making odd little clucking noises.  I was Skyping from a neighbor's house; my neighbor has an extremely affectionate cat, Frannie, who kept wandering across the keyboard in search of attention.  Well, y'know...

The whole thing here.

PS A commenter has drawn my attention to the fact that this link only goes to an iTunes format. Scott's introductory blogpost, with links to various podcast formats, is here: http://bottlerocketscience.blogspot.com/2016/05/helen-dewitt-is-author-of-last-samurai.html