Erika Dreifus

Yesterday I read something that brought me instantly to one of those “and my book hasn’t been published?” moments.

Maybe you know this moment, too. You find out something is going to be published, or has been recently published, and you just can’t believe that we function within an industry that publishes such (can’t say the word–my mom occasionally reads this blog) while your own manuscript waits and waits for an agent, editor, and/or publisher to pick it up.

The book that nearly made me cry in pity for my own little short story collection is O.J. Simpson’s new tome, If I Did It. According to this article, the book, which will be out at the end of this month, “‘hypothetically describes how the murders [of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman] would have been committed.'”

Hypothetically. Right.

Later I learned that O.J. was paid an advance of more than $3 million. The only thing that’s more outrageous than anyone paying him that much is the possibility that the payer (ReganBooks/HarperCollins) has avoided paying O.J. directly and thereby made it more difficult for the still-grieving families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson to collect on the monies awarded them in the civil case.

So there’s my contribution. My choice for most-I-can’t-believe-this-book-is-being/has been-published. What’s yours?

UPDATE (NOVEMBER 20, 2006):
If you haven’t heard the good news yet, read about the cancellation(s) here.

There’s a blog I often appreciate for its concrete and practical information for book reviewers. I used to link to it right here.

But this summer I removed that link. Why? Because that blog, maintained by the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle (an organization I joined just this past summer), too often takes an anti-Israel stance, both in its choice of links and in its summaries/introductions of that material. I simply can’t condone such a practice, however implicitly.

I’ve taken my share of attacks on that blog for my protests within “comments.” But I’m not sorry I said what I said there this summer, when the posts proliferated (as it happened, right after my membership application was processed). Yes, my open disagreement may have damaged my own career, now or in the future. (How “smart” is it to alienate members–including the president, the chief anti-Israel poster [he struck yet again yesterday]–of the National Book Critics Circle?)

But some things are too important. Sometimes, you can’t just ignore what others say or “be nice,” as my mom has always urged. As Sanford Pinsker’s new essay at JBooks.com has reminded me, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

Happy New Year. See you back here next week.

When I want to find reliable information about something literary happening outside the United States, one of the first places I check is the Literary Saloon (linked to the right). So as I follow the developing Gunter Grass story, that’s one of the sites I keep checking. To catch up, click here.

I’ve been mulling over this Ha’aretz article for awhile. It describes the resignation of a group of Israeli journalists from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). According to the article, their resignation followed the IFJ’s general secretary’s refusal to “retract his condemnation of Israel’s bombing of Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station in Beirut.”

So here’s my question: what would you do if a leader of a professional writers’ organization to which you belonged wrote, verbalized in speech, or otherwise presented, in his or her role as leader of that organization, outright biased political statements–with which you disagreed? Have you faced this kind of situation in the past? How have you responded/acted, if at all?