New book by our sometime cover artist:
Paycock Press
3819 North 13th Street
Arlington, VA 22201
E-mail: gargoyle@gargoylemagazine.com
Good news!
$18.95 464 pp
Cover art by Sheep Jones
ISBN 9780931181351
• Amazing Graces, our newest collection of fiction by Washington, DC-area women, is garnering great blurbs! Click here for details.
The Amazing Graces launch party, held onSunday, January 8, at the renowned DC bookstore Politics & Prose, was a smash success! We sold 200 copies of our newest book and enjoyed insights about its development from an eight-author panel moderated by Bethanne Patrick. Panelists Rae Bryant, Celeste Crenshaw, Beth Frerking, Jennifer Howard, Esther Iverem, Priscilla Nemeth, Wanda Warner and Kathleen Wheaton each read a paragraph from her piece in the new anthology (it worked like a collage) and then fielded questions from the audience and the moderator. The event was truly a celebration, not a marathon.
"I wish I could have all 45 women in the book seated at the front of the shop, but they won’t let me," said editor Richard Peabody, owner of Paycock Press. However, "I invited the alumni from the series’ first four volumes, and writers who are penciled in for a sixth volume so they can see what the fuss is all about."
For details, go to the Politics & Prose site: http://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/richard-peabody-ed-amazing-graces
• Tom Carson's new novel, Daisy Buchanan's Daughter, is available now — and has been getting rave reviews (see below). The newest mention: Vanity Fair! Elissa Schappell says, "... Tom Carson, a black belt in the art of meta-narrative, goes where none have dared to tread, composing a sequel to what many (read: me) consider the great American novel, The Great Gatsby ... " More at: http://www.vanityfair.com/fanfair/just-my-type/genre-bending-201111
• A big chunk of Tom Carson's "Daisy Buchanan's Daughter" appears in the new issue of Black Clock. A great magazine.
http://blackclock.org/
• We had a great time at the July 24 launch party for this wonderful novel, at Washington, DC's Politics & Prose bookstore on Connecticut Avenue NW. Here are scenes from the launch party, showing author Carson reading from his novel and interacting with fans of his work.
• More voices heard from - the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society has this to say:
"Anyone who has read F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece of American literature, The Great Gatsby, has longed to know what was in the future for Fitzgerald's characters, including the daughter of the glamorous Daisy Buchanan ... Along comes Tom Carson, a man with an imagination, who can keep that imagination running full steam ahead while dealing with the realities of "The American Century" ... Pamela Buchanan, Daisy's daughter, is Carson's vehicle for a rollicking romp through the century that begins in the Jazz Age and takes us into the war in Iraq. Carson's sharp powers of observation ... give the reader the sense of time and place that ground this picaresque novel in reality and at the same time titillate the reader with the humor of pecurliarly American anecdotal passages dealing with politics, culture, and fashion. ..."
—Rosemary James, co-founder, Faulkner Society, and author/editor of My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers and co-author of Plot or Politics?
• We're on the radio! Check it out at:
http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2011/07/27/20049/kipen-7-27-11/
• Here's what Jason Alexander of the Toronto Globe and Mail has to say about Daisy Buchanan's Daughter:
"... Pamela Buchanan didn’t get a starring role in the novel in which she first appeared ... But lucky for her, there are authors who enjoy saving even the most peripheral figures in canonic works of literature from bit-part status. ... the young Miss Buchanan now gets to be a marquee player.
"At more than 600 pages, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is a star vehicle on the scale of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. Presented as a series of blog postings by Pamela (Pam for short), written on her 86th birthday, the book has the requisite cast of thousands, too. ...
"They’re all united in the universe created by Tom Carson. A long-time writer for GQ and Esquire, Carson is an old hand at such metafictional hijinks, having spun off the characters on Gilligan’s Island in many bewildering new directions in his 2003 novel Gilligan’s Wake. Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is an even nuttier proposition and twice as ambitious as a survey of American life between the 1920s and 2006 ..."
The full review is at:
• In a featured review at the Washington Independent Review of Books, Susan Storer Clark says of Tom Carson's new novel, Daisy Buchanan's Daughter: "Salty, peppery, smart old ladies make great conversational companions, and Pamela Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan’s witty and fearlessly intelligent daughter, makes an endlessly entertaining narrator of her own story. ...
"Readers who enjoyed Tom Carson’s Gilligan’s Wake will likely enjoy this novel too ... one strength of this novel is the surprising tenderness with which the narrator treats her. Other relationships are also portrayed movingly ..."
The full review may be found at: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/daisy-buchanans-daughter/
• We also are thrilled with Steven Moore's take in the July 26 Washington Post Book World: "You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest, a satiric revue of the dearly departed American Century starring an 86-year-old woman who saw it all. The daughter of that charmer whose 'voice is full of money,' as gold-hatted Gatsby said of Daisy, Pamela Buchanan tells what happened after the last mournful pages of 'The Great Gatsby' ...
"That liberated voice, more than the story itself, is what makes 'Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter' such a joy to read ... she rides madly off in all directions in a maximalist style where no noun lacks an adjective, no pun is too low and no allusion is too far-fetched. ... "
Read the full review at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-world-review-daisy-buchanans-daughter-wittily-chronicles-20th-century/2011/05/17/gIQAbrfQbI_story.html?wprss=rss_style
• Daisy Buchanan's Daughter was one of nine books in the Sunday, July 3, "Editor's Choice" list of the New York Times. Check it out at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/books/review/EdChoice-t.html
• James Hynes calls this work "some sort of crazy masterpiece."
• And there's more—in our first review: "Tom Carson’s Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is an uproarious, antic, tender, and proudly huge novel, a turtlecrackingly thick book ("1.8 pounds" says Amazon.com) that earns its status as an American epic even while it redefines what a literary epic is. ... But it is also a novel of the world, shuttling from Long Island to Los Angeles to Paris to West Africa. Today even big fictions can feel small, but Carson’s book has real weight, and he revels in the bulky life he chronicles. Here’s a take on the American century by a woman determined to debunk the convenient lies we’ve told ourselves about it. ..."
—Mark Athitakis, City Paper (Washington, DC)
For the full review, go here:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/41064/daisy-buchanans-daughter-by-tom-carson-reviewed-a-fitzgerald-riffing/
• The New York Times Sunday Book Review has this to say: " ... Most “Gatsby” characters play surprisingly short roles in this novel, but Pam’s truncated relationship with her mother is especially moving: Daisy, trapped in a loveless second marriage, becomes an addict and, finally, a suicide. Pam recalls with sadness her childish cruelty to a clearly unfulfilled and unhappy woman. Tom Carson even manages to bring tenderness to Pam’s unlikely platonic affair with a beleaguered Lyndon Johnson, and to her improbable meetings over the years with a former Dachau inmate.
"In fact, implausibility is Carson’s most powerful tool, for 'Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter' is a picaresque, and as such has a duty to travel by whatever madcap means available. Carson — the film critic for GQ and the author of the novel 'Gilligan’s Wake' — gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds ... "
The full review is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-daisy-buchanans-daughter-by-tom-carson.html
• If you prefer e-books, you're in luck: Daisy Buchanan's Daughterhas gone live and can now be downloaded onto the Kindle at Amazon.com!
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