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Reading on the beach all day, working the night shift at a convenience store, studying abroad in England, and interning at Beaufort Books: respectively, these are the ways I’ve spent my last four summers. I’ve always found summers to be fun and exciting, but ultimately, regardless of the meaningful adventures I’ve had within them, these months have always been primarily a buffer between school years. Next summer, though, I’ll have graduated from college—I won’t have any school years left. Quite frankly, it’s a little bit terrifying to have no idea where I’ll be living or what I’ll be doing in just one year’s time. What I do know, though, is that at least I’ll be stepping into the unknown armed with all the lessons and skills I’ve accrued from summers past. In the summer going into my freshman year of college, I learned how to relax and go easy on myself when adapting to big life changes. Going into my sophomore year, I learned how to work at any task as hard as possible and with a smile on my face (and also may have unintentionally memorized the cost of my inevitable daily 16 oz. French vanilla cappuccino). Going into my junior year, I learned how to move past my fears to immerse myself in new environments.

2014: Reading on the beach: the ideal summer scenario

And from the summer going into my senior year? There’s so much I’ve learned while interning at Beaufort I’m not even sure where to begin! I’ve gotten firsthand experience with a wide range of fields in publishing like PR updates, copyediting, manuscript submissions, and even the wild world of BookExpo. A few things I know now that I didn’t at the beginning of the summer include how to: take artsy Instagram pictures of books; recognize the plot, author, and cover design of a shocking amount of books in our catalog (painstakingly reorganizing the office shelves and constantly needing to look up titles on our website was very helpful in that regard); read emails at light speed; and professionally answer a phone without internally freaking out (… for the most part). Perhaps most importantly, I also now appreciate the importance of investing in high quality office supplies—I love to jot down every detail of every project I’m given, but this was made significantly more complicated when my spiral ring notebook fell apart completely my first week on the job. (Though incredibly flimsy, it was a memento from my sorority that I didn’t have the heart to replace. Bad move.)

2015: Getting ready for a night of working at Wawa

Though I’m still figuring out what in the world I want to do after all college, I have a feeling that my takeaways from Beaufort will help me no matter where I end up. This time next summer I might not be shipping packages full of books, but thanks to the day where I thought I’d be fine without putting in extra packing material and ultimately had to rip open, stuff, and re-tape sixteen boxes, I’ll always remember it’s better to be safe than sorry. I might not be assigning keywords to titles on Amazon, but I’ll always benefit from the attention to detail that that task required me to develop. And I might not be reading submissions, but I’m sure that thinking back on some of the more entertaining pieces I reviewed this summer will never fail to make me smile.

2016: A literary-themed pub in England that matches my Beaufort pen name

So that’s why I want to say thanks for everything, Beaufort! Even though this coming summer will be the first that I won’t be able to handily describe as “the summer going into [insert year of schooling here]”, I know that with everything I’ve learned in the summers leading up to it—especially this one—I’ll be ready for whatever it has to offer. (After all, I’m not sure anything could be more difficult than the first time I had to decipher a royalty report spreadsheet.)

Happy reading,

Sherlock Beaulmes

2017: The door that has warmly welcomed me every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday this summer

I have just started to work here as an intern at Beaufort and this is my first publishing job ever. Being in this environment has made me take stock of books and how they have shaped my life. Ever since I could remember books have been stacked sky high in my household. Growing up I would always see all of these old books around my house. Some books were placed on rickety shelves that were dipping due to the sheer weight of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others were stacked in strategic places around the house, piles that went all the way up to my chest. At first, the idea of reading these books was daunting. I saw them as unreadable and too complex. But, as I got older and reading became a passion, I tried to read as many books as I could. I became fascinated with these authors on my bookshelves. I learned about new authors and bought more and more books.  I collected more books than I could read. But I couldn’t stop sometimes.  When I patrolled the aisles of my local book stores I kept finding new books that I wanted to read.  It didn’t help that some of my favorite authors would release new books some years.

Reading all of the books I have spread around my house became a task at some points, like homework. It was hard to read my books during college due to the schoolwork I had. So, every break I had, Christmas break, summer break, spring break, Easter break, Presidents weekend, Columbus Day, etc., I tried to read as many books as I could. I became disappointed when I didn’t hit a certain amount of pages some days or didn’t read as many books as I would’ve liked to. I learned that I was sucking the fun out of reading when I looked at it like this. Over this Christmas break I set out to finish a good chunk of books.  I made a list of all the books and was ready to check them off. A revolving door of family members came through my house during the break. I also traveled to see others and began working at my internship. All of this hurt my prospects of checking off the books on my list. When I got to my next book on the list, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, I realized that I might not finish by the time the semester starts. I have come to grips with this. Reading shouldn’t be a chore. I should be able to pickup a book and allow it to envelope me. I am going to come back to The Corrections throughout my semester and finish it at my own pace. I am going to pick up other books during this time and start them. I feel like I need to learn to pick up books whenever I have a chance and read any amount, whether it is five pages or a hundred pages. I also feel like I need to put down books that I am not interested in and don’t like. I shouldn’t feel obligated to finish a book; it is just a waste of time. Besides, I may come back to a ditched book and find that past me was an idiot for not liking it. I hope that this new approach will allow me to tackle more books on my reading list and most importantly allow myself to enjoy reading even more.

-Matt, intern Beaufort Books

This is a shared blog post for Spencer Hill Press and Beaufort Books

Recently I finished reading The People in the Trees, a terrific, yet haunting work of fiction written by Hanya Yanagihara. The book is essentially the edited memoir of renowned scientist Dr. Norton Perina, who writes his memoir from prison after he is accused and convicted of committing a heinous crime. Norton’s memoir is made available to the reader thanks to his friend and colleague Dr. Ronald Kubodera, who prompts Norton to write the manuscript and acts as editor and narrator, providing helpful footnotes for the reader’s benefit. In his memoir Norton tells the reader of his childhood, his relationship with his twin brother, his research trip to a mysterious island in the Pacific, his discovery of a turtle that can grant immortality, and his eventual undoing. From the beginning, however, the reader is suspicious of Norton and his account of the events that led to him being in prison. The reader is also suspicious of Ronald, who might or might not be filtering and editing the truth that Norton might or might not be telling. Yanagihara has then given the reader not one, but two unreliable narrators, which I must admit at times was more than I could bear. Was Norton being truthful or was he writing a lie? And was Ronald publishing the truth and nothing but the truth, or simply an edited, less implicating version of it? The ending of the novel, which left me chilled to the bone, provides an answer to these questions.

By Hanya Yanagihara

The book left me thinking about unreliable narrators and the role they play in literature. Yanagihara’s characters join a slew of unreliable narrators that litter the fiction genre, including the lascivious Humbert Humbert in Lolita and self-proclaimed liar Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

By Vladimir Nabokov

By J.D. Salinger

Why is the unreliable narrator so popular in literature? My guess is that unreliable narrators are the closest thing we have in fiction to the human psyche. Think this over for a moments: when you’re telling a story to a friend, you’re telling it from your point of view and, whether you like it or not, your truth might be different from someone else’s truth. Maybe the guy sitting next to you saw things a little bit differently than you, but how could you possibly know that? When you’re telling a story, it’s hard to remain objective. The same thing happens with many unreliable narrators. The unreliable narrator in fiction isn’t necessarily an outright liar. He or she might lie by omission, exaggerate something, give an event less importance than it deserves, and so on. Some unreliable narrators might simply be unhinged (Edgar Allan Poe definitely gave us a lot of those in his short stories). In essence, however, the unreliable narrator is someone who is telling a slanted truth. It’s something we all do, albeit subconsciously. Some readers abhor dealing with unreliable narrators, claiming that they are nothing more than an overused literary technique. I respectfully disagree. The unreliable narrator is a mirror image of the human mind, which is always at work on a subconscious level. Yes, there are unreliable narrators who are being deliberately coy and untruthful, but the best type of unreliable narrator, in my opinion, is the one who doesn’t know he or she is sliding towards unreliability, the one that swears he or she is telling the truth and nothing but the truth, the one who suddenly plants a seed of doubt in the reader with masterfully uttered words, the one that, inevitably, lives inside every single one of us.

Until next time,

Simply Beautanical

Having just finished The Silkworm, the second novel in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, I find myself thinking a lot about pseudonyms. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Robert Gablraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy. Rowling assumed the pen name last year when she wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first novel in the Cormoran Strike series.

Now, being the successful writer that she is, why would J.K Rowling want to write under a pen name? In Rowling’s case, the answer is simple. After seven little books featuring a well-known character by the name of Harry Potter, it’s no surprise that Rowling might’ve wanted some anonymity. The Harry Potter series is arguably one of the most successful in history, spawning a hit film series and a huge fan base. The series’ popularity also made Rowling a literary star. After the series ended, Rowling wrote The Casual Vacancy, a well reviewed fiction novel that sold pretty well because, let’s face it, it was written by J.K. Rowling (I myself purchased, read, and loved this book, but I’m not so sure I would’ve picked up if it were written by an unknown author). So, after more than a couple of literary hits, it’s not surprising that Rowling might have wanted some literary obscurity. And so, Robert Galbraith was born.

Rowling is not the first successful author to adopt a pen name. Celebrated writers like Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Michael Crichton have assumed pen names during their literary careers. In Rowling’s case, her pen name has given the world a new crime/detective series featuring Detective Cormoran Strike, an Afghanistan war veteran turned private detective. As Rowling herself explains, the reason why she wanted to write under a pseudonym was because she wanted to revert to simpler times: “I was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback. It was a fantastic experience and I only wish it could have gone on a little longer.” Alas, Rowling’s anonymity was short-lived, because she’s simply too good. Critics and reviewers quickly noticed that The Cuckoo’s Calling was too good to have been written by a rookie, and after some speculation the news finally broke that Rowling was in fact behind this new series.

The fact that Rowling’s secret was revealed so quickly supports my main argument: when you’re a good writer, that will shine through no matter what name you’re using. I believe that when an author publishes under a pseudonym they are looking for reassurance that they are actually good writers, regardless of their celebrity. Through Galbraith, Rowling has proved that she’s more than capable of writing a really good book, wizards and witches set aside.

Until next time,

Simply Beautanical

Blanket Flower

The Silkworm, written by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Sources

About

http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/how-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-was-uncovered.html

Famous Authors with Secret Pseudonyms

Hello there!

I’m Emily, one of Beaufort’s new summer interns. For the sake of this blog, however, I will be known as SWS, or Septimus Warren Smith, inspired by one of my favorite books of all time, Mrs. Dalloway. Just recently, Ripe Time – an organization that adapts literature for the stage (check ‘em out! – http://ripetime.org/clarissa-dalloday/) – put on a marathon reading of Mrs. Dalloway at several locations throughout Brooklyn. I stopped in just as Septimus was being introduced into the narrative, gazing up at a passing aeroplane. A World War I veteran suffering from PTSD, Septimus’ speech throughout the novel is often garbled and paranoid; and yet several monologues of his are of the most resonant and insightful comments Mrs. Dalloway has to offer.

“So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling their intention to provide him, for nothing, forever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty!”

For all of you kick starting your summer reading lists, Mrs. Dalloway is a must. I’ll recommend two others as well –

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner: Ms. Kushner’s most recent book, The Flamethrowers, draws upon an eclectic conglomerate of topics, including motorcycle racing, land art, Minimalism, and the underground political movement in 1970s Italy. Intrigued? Check out this clip from the National Book Award readings and you will surely be convinced: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2013_f_kushner.html#.U6RkivmTXTp

Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin: Possibly my #1 book if I am forced to choose. I have come back to this book again and again and am continually touched by what Baldwin has to say. The story follows American expatriate David as he travels to Paris and engages in an unconventional romance with Italian bartender Giovanni, taboo for many reasons, not the least of which is his engagement to Hella. I was saddened to discover Baldwin’s absence from the list of books suggested for Common Core standards, and now feel a personal responsibility to promote him. So, read Giovanni’s Room! You won’t regret it.

That’s all for now. Make sure to stay tuned for future blog posts from yours truly, SWS.

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