One hundred and forty-one old men

Over the weekend of the 19th and 20th of July 2008, the town of Key West in Florida played host to one hundred and forty-one — Ernest Hemingways. Hemingways from all over America gathered in Key West in a competition for the greatest degree of physical resemblance between the famous writer and his surrogates. This year the winner was Tom Grizzard, in what is said to have been a very stiff competition. The photograph that went round the world shows a collection of merry granddads, looking like Father Christmases who have escaped from their winter duties, that is to say like Ernest Hemingway. The old men, who meet every year in Key West on Hemingway’s birthday, took part in fishing and short story writing competitions.

Another old man . . .

The following day newspapers in Croatia carried a photograph of an old man who has no connection at all with the hundred and forty-one old men from the previous article. In Croatia on 21st July 2008, Dinko Sakic died, at the age of eighty-six. Who was Dinko Sakic? Sakic was the commandant of the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac, where Jews, Serbs, Gyspies and communist-oriented Croats were systematically annihilated. After the war he managed to escape to Argentina, and it was not until 1999 that the Argentinian authorities handed him over to Croatia, where he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

It’s a really interesting piece—as are all of her essays—and would have fit in nicely with the essays in which started shipping to stores earlier this week . . .

And it’s fitting that this morning’s New York Times has this on Karadzic refusing to enter pleas on the 11 charges brought against him by the United Nations war crimes tribunal, claiming that he is “deeply convinced that this court is representing itself falsely as an international court, whereas it is a court of NATO, which wishes to liquidate me.”

We have a couple of reviews coming up in the next week or so—Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories and I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou—and more interviews with booksellers.

There is some news that I’d like to pass along though. As most of you know, Dubravka Ugresic’s Nobody’s Home — our first book — arrived last week.

Copies are being mailed out to subscribers today (subscriptions to the “fall season” are only $65 plus shipping and can be found ), and will be arriving in better bookstores—and online retailers—everywhere in early-September.

To celebrate this first release, we’re offering a special discount on Nobody’s Home through our website. From now until the end of the month you can for only $11.95. (30% off the cover price.)

For all members, 10 copies are available through the program. All you have to do is “request a copy” through the Early Reviewers page and you’ll be entered into a drawing for a free copy. Registration closes on August 17th, so you’ll have to sign up soon.

So, since we’re a bit nerdy and a little too hyped up, we took some photos of the package from , who did an excellent job on the books.

Here is the package:

You can see the books peeping out, just waiting to take a look around their new home:

Here they are, shrink-wrapped for safe keeping. Can they breath in there?

That’s better. Spines out, like you’d do it on a book shelf:

A first look inside:

And , the designs look great on the finished books:

Any day now we should have a few copies of the finished books on hand. Drinks will be drunk.

Both E.J. and I love Dubravka’s work (and both edited her in the past—E.J. did The Ministry of Pain at Ecco, and I did Thank You for Not Reading at Dalkey Archive. One of her greatest books is The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, which is available from New Directions) and feel fortunate that this will be our first Open Letter publication. (The book doesn’t officially release until September 26th, but we will be offering an advance special deal via this blog as soon as these arrive from the printer.)

Nobody’s Home is a great collection, and to celebrate it, we’ve put together a bit of a reading tour for Dubravka. We may still add some dates, and more details will be available on the (and our ) in the near future, but for now, here’s the current itinerary:

Tuesday, September 16th
Reading and Conversation at the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)

Tuesday, September 23rd
Reading at the with Breyten Breytenbach (New York, NY)

Wednesday, September 24th
Harvard Book Store at 7pm (Boston, MA)

Tuesday, September 30th
57th Street Books at 6pm (Chicago, IL)

Wednesday, October 1st
Bookslut Conversation Series (Chicago, IL)

Wednesday, October 8th
McNally Jackson (aka McNally Robinson) event with Open Letter author Bragi Olafsson (New York, NY)

Tuesday, October 14th
Conversation with Brigid Hughes of A Public Space, at Melville House Press office and bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

Things would be simpler if the people who did all this were willing to agree that they had been killing for the sake of killing, destroying for the sake of destroying, torching for the sake of torching. That, of course, will not happen. History and culture are the most reliable ‘banks’ for laundering a dirty conscience. History and culture are part and parcel of what is known as the national cultural identity, though the national and the identity are only figments of the collective imagination. The collective, however, is to be believed. An individual killer would never be able to say: “I killed defending William Shakespeare because he is part of my cultural heritage.” A collective, on the other hand, can. This is seen, indeed, as its right.