I went to one of my local bookstore behemoths on my lunch break today, in search of “The Black Issue” of Italian Vogue.

Although it’s sold out and been restocked several times in places like New York City and Los Angeles, I hadn’t been able to find it at all here in middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-state Florida.

I went to the bookstore and was disappointed when I didn’t see Vogue Italia in the fashion magazines section with all the other Vogues, especially since a store worker told me last week that she expected it this week.

Then I had a sinking feeling.

The magazine had a black woman (on my copy, the gorgeous Ethiopian model Liya Kebede) on the cover, didn’t it?

They wouldn’t. Would they?

I rounded the other side of the magazine stand.

They did. It was right next to Vibe and Ebony.

Yes, I did have a “chat” with the store manager.

When does the age difference between a man and a woman in a romantic relationship start to get weird?

10 years?

20 years? 25? 30? 35? 40?

Or is a wide age disparity weird at all?

Does it make a difference when it’s the woman who’s older?

Niambi Brown Davis and Francis Ray both considered May-December relationships in 2008 releases — but one was a bit more successful at it than the other.

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On tonight’s episode of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, a panel including Steve Wasserman, former editor of the LAT Book Review, and Kassia Krozser, editor of Booksquare, discussed the decision of Los Angeles Times management to fold the paper’s book review section into another features section.

My concern about folding book review sections has been that it means fewer authors will get the exposure that a review — good or bad — can mean. For black authors, who often struggle to get reviewed at all, this is just another obstacle to getting attention from a wide audience.

Some highlights (paraphrased) from the show itself after the jump.

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Pam Grier — who is 59 years old, believe it or not — plans to write an autobiography.

There are lots of celebrity memoirs that are incredibly boring, but I’m hopeful that that Pam’s, on Grand Central Publishing/Springboard Press, will be decent.

With any luck, she won’t skimp on the awesome Foxy Brown-era details.

And I need to know exactly how Quentin Tarantino approached her for Jackie Brown — and what she thought of him when he did.

The book is expected to be published in 2010.

Also, why did I not know that she sang backup for Bobby Womack and Sly and the Family Stone?

This adds to her general awesomeness.

Photo from Cornell Cinema

There’s a review of Palace Council, the newest book by Yale law professor and mystery author Stephen L. Carter, in this week’s New York Times Book Review.

I’m not sure whether I’ll read this. The Emperor of Ocean Park, Carter’s first book, had what seemed like an interesting concept, but ultimately tipped into the fail column for me because it wasn’t edited ruthlessly enough.

New England White had the same problem — and was wildly disappointing on the whole — so I’m not optimistic about Palace Council.

The reviewer hints that once again Carter assembles tasty ingredients for a dish that doesn’t live up to its potential.

There is, believe it or not, a fine novel begging to get out of all this Da Vinci-coded nonsense. Carter gives us two complicated and appealing main characters, Edward Trotter Wesley Jr. and Aurelia Treene, both too good for the plot they’re tossed into.

…

At any number of points, one wants to turn to this learned, imaginative writer and say — as Eddie might have, long ago, to Richard Nixon — “You can be so much better than this.”

Anybody read this yet and have opinions about it?

CNN’s promoting a multipart special it’s doing on the black experience in America.

Although the meat of the series begins July 23, there’s a special panel discussing issues related to blacks in America airing beginning tonight (Saturday, July 19) and tomorrow. The panel, filmed at the Essence Music Festival, includes author/professor Roland Fryer, author/actor Hill Harper, author/pastor T.D. Jakes and author/professor Cornel West.

I have an iPhone.

I’ve had it since last year, when my technogeek husband surprised me with it as an anniversary gift.

Everything you’ve heard is true: having an iPhone really will clear up your complexion and make you thinner.

OK, maybe not.

But it is a fantastic product and incredibly fun to use.

One of the coolest options with the new iPhone update is that HarperCollins is offering several titles optimized just for Apple’s favorite moneymaker.

As someone who is often an early adopter and has been searching for an e-reader that is both fun to use and has some sex appeal, it pains me to say this, but  [whisper] I’m not entirely certain that reading books on the iPhone will be a pleasurable experience.[/whisper]

I know cell-phone books are the next frontier, but I’m not sure I want to read books on a screen this small.

In a pinch, sure, but not as my primary e-reader. I really haven’t been able to get into reading anything longer than, say, a New Yorker article on my iPhone yet.

Still, I’ll give it a try sometime soon and see what it’s like.

This entry has been crossposted at Blogging in Black.

Hi.

My name is Anika, I write for a living, and I sometimes struggle with criticism of my work.

I’ve found that it really doesn’t matter whether the criticism is constructive or vindictive or even whether it comes from someone who knows my industry well or a complete naif.

It all hurts at least a tiny bit.

Although my real-world job doesn’t involve writing fiction, I do work hard at what I do, so when a reader calls, e-mails — or, God forbid, blogs — about errors of judgment, grammar or fact in my work, it makes me want to hide underneath my bed.

I imagine it’s even worse for book authors. While I only get to spend a few hours (or when I’m lucky, a few days) on my projects, novelists can spend weeks, months or years living with their books in the writing, editing and revising process.

So when I write reviews for my blog or tell people about books I’ve read, it’s with empathy for the artist who has put heart and soul into the book I’m describing — and never intentionally vicious.

To be sure, some authors have reacted poorly to reader criticism.

Back when she still wrote about ambiguously gay (is there any other kind?) vampires, author Anne Rice famously unleashed fury on some readers who didn’t treat her books with the respect she felt her work deserved. And Lord knows that it’s never a good idea for an author to tell readers they don’t have sense enough to criticize his/her work.

But there are some things I’ve learned because people have told me what I could do better.

• I write more clearly and directly (although that’s something I’ll be working on until the day I die).
  
• I pay more attention the rhythms of people’s speech, so I can accurately reproduce those patterns.
• I routinely kill my darlings.
  
• I do enough research to be able to back up even the most innocuous of throwaway ideas in my writing, because somebody, somewhere, is an expert in the subject of the phrase or paragraph I tossed off, and will be deeply insulted if I don’t write about it correctly.
  

Have you taken to heart anything you’ve heard from your critics? How has that criticism made you a better writer?

This week’s New York Times Book Review takes a look at the young-adult speculative fiction novel The Shadow Speaker, by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, about whom I’ve written before.

The review is mixed, lauding Okorafor-Mbachu’s imagination but still saying that the story was “flat on the page.”

An excerpt from the review:

Still, there are creative touches here that fans of fantasy will not want to miss, like the book’s unforgettable scenery. Following Ejii and Dikéogu’s journey through the parched Sahara, they cross into Ginen’s Kingdom of Ooni, where plants grow into houses and where a room might smell like lilacs and have “bright blue spiders, transparent-skinned geckos, lizards with long metallic-looking nails and all sorts of beetles,” even “a tiny red-orange monkey clinging to the ceiling.” And there is magic too in the character of Queen Jaa: when she speaks, “a red flower with glasslike petals” falls from the sky to accompany her prophetic words and war-mongering tactics.

Big Spankable Asses has…uh…won the 2008 Cover Cafe Worst Cover contest.

Let’s congratulate Angie Daniels, Kimberly Kaye Terry and Lisa G. Riley, shall we?

No?

I shuddered in horror the first time I came across this book. Both the title and the art turned me right off (plus, as an erotic romance anthology, it’s well down the slippery slope to plain ol’ erotica). After meeting the adorable Riley at Romance Slam Jam, I considered reading it, but still haven’t been able to get past the cover.

This is a concept that wasn’t ever going to work, no matter what they did.

They couldn’t put somebody with a frame like Buffie The Body (possibly NSFW) or Vida Guerra (also possibly NSFW) on it, because it would never have been displayed in bookstores.

So they put a chick who clearly lacks the titular big, spankable *ss on the cover, meaning that it was never going to be anything but full of fail.

Would a plain cover with just the title on it have worked? Maybe.

It’s possible that they would’ve been safer choosing a less direct title for the book if they wanted to go with such a literal illustration. Shapely Sirens, mayhaps? Just plain Spankable?

It’s not the worst book cover I’ve ever seen — not in a universe where Thong On Fire exists — but it’s certainly not…good.