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Mark Ovenden is our guest blogger during the week of December 3rd. If you have any questions for Mark Ovenden, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Transit Maps of the World:

Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.

About Mark Ovenden

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Strange things have been known to emerge from the slushpile. In its depths are known to reside remarkable and sometimes dangerous creatures. Following the zombie outbreak of ‘06, the Editorial Assistants have been tasked with guarding it each night to ensure that nothing else emerges to wreak havok amidst the offices and cubicles of the 5th floor.

I crept up to the containment room last night, and while I lacked the bravery to actually enter, I managed to crack open the door and tape the conversation taking place within…

Cameron Dufty: Like most New Yorkers, I bet you spend a lot of time on public transit. What is the latest book you have read while en-route?

Danielle Stockley: I am currently reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman. While I am enjoying it, it is not the most practical subway book. I am having some trouble holding the pages open with one hand while maintaining my balance with the other. Each page turn only increases my fear that I will end up on someone’s lap. Ease of subway reading is a factor that I consider before I buy any book. Does it figure into your purchasing decisions, Cam?

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Does Speaking a Feeling Change a Feeling?

Case example: Imagine that I’ve been angry for a month, and I finally pass the woman I’m angry at, so say, “I’m angry at you.” Once I say it, I’ve actually changed the emotion.Now it’s harder to comfort or kid myself about it in secret. Once spoken out loud, an emotion is a different animal--now it’s information between us, which people can argue about or laugh at or critique.Talk with others changes the very thing we’re dealing with.

Modern psychology is doing very neat work with this idea.For instance, psychologists working in Narrative Theory study the influence of the words you choose on your own behaviors.The phrases you speak out of habit can change your tendency to do one thing or the other.This might seem obvious: If the youngest kid in the family is nicknamed the “grouch,” she’ll start expecting and excusing her own grouchiness. And if her older brother is routinely called “the disciplined kid,” he expects and pursues harder work. A large part of changing behaviors is changing the stories with which we explain our lives to others. If I change my story, I change my own expectations and tendencies.

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(Parts of this blog entry first appeared on a blog called Literature & Life that I run at Barnes&Noble.com. Check out this ongoing conversation about how classic books change our daily lives).

You might love your job, house, and family, but the sound of your own voice might still sometimes bore you. That is: Life is good when we have a routine that works, but sticking to the routine has its own drawbacks: From time to time, I can feel deadeningly, or too much, like “myself.”

I do like my fixed routines--like the daily trip to the gym--but sometimes, lifting weights, I’m frustrated that another possible “me” isn’t living the life it could.

We are always allowing ourselves little escapes from the work-day “me.” Escapes come from the mild to the extreme: A midday cell-phone conversation is a mild form of self-escape; a book is a dependable, rich escape; so is a trip to a foreign country.

Virginia Woolf is my favorite dreamer and novelist—a woman who lived and wrote from 1882 to 1941. Woolf was someone who lived so thoroughly in her head that she also spent a lot of her time dreaming up ways to escape or expand it.

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It took me three weeks to get the requisite security clearance to enter the Penguin Publicity Panopticon and be granted an audience with Publicity Manager Tina Anderson. Her ability to multi-task was incredible; even while answering my questions she kept a weather eye on over fifteen screens which were, as far as I could tell, relaying information from all seven continents simultaneously.

Tell us about yourself, how you came to your current position, to publishing in general, and what your relationship is to Roc and Ace.

As an assistant I was assigned to work on the Ace imprint, which is actually the sister imprint to Roc. After graduating through the ranks I ended up as the publicity manager of Roc and Ace, and I now oversee somebody who does all the day to day work. I’m in charge of the high level thinking and scheduling any tours, and making sure that we stay within our budget and the publicity plans that we set for the titles.

I didn't think I would work on SF/fantasy when I originally came into publishing, but I soon came to appreciate the books that I worked on and grew relationships with my authors. That made it worthwhile to continue working on the genre. But it wasn't my first love, actually.

What was your first love?

My first love was historical fiction, mysteries, and good novels in general. But if I had to pick between SF and fantasy, I would probably choose to read fantasy novels.

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It’s holiday time. Holiday time can be depressing. This is the time of the year when store windows sing with (commercial) cheer, house decorations insist we be HAPPY, and families flaunt their families. In turn, the “holiday blues” can set in just around now: From November to January, people who-are-often-loners-but-generally-feel-OK can get atypically depressed.

Holidays suggest we should be more joyfully social than a lot of us naturally are. So we doubt our simple love of solitude. A pressure for bliss can also make our (naturally imperfect) family or friendships annoy us all the more.

Who Parties?
Modern psychology makes a very cool distinction between people who thrive on stimulating environments and those who don’t. The distinction actually came out of research on pain thresholds: Some of us are more stoic about events like jamming our fingers or breaking our ankles than others are. In 1967, a researcher named Asenath Petrie defined two types of personalities: the “augmenter” and the “reducer.” The “augmenter” is sensitive to excitement: She feels pain more than most and dislikes other types of chaos, including heavy drinking and loud noise. In contrast, the “reducer” has a high threshold for action. She loves a party and is a social type; she has a bigger tolerance for pain, seeks crowds, and tends to turn her music up louder than others do. So: Different people have different relationships to stimuli. Some can’t get enough of the crowd; some like to shut it down.

» Amy Goldwasser discusses the essays—and the teenage girls who wrote them—featured in Red, on the Penguin Podcast.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

Other author podcasts:

» An interview with Nick Hornby about his latest book on the NPR: Books Podcast.

Amy Goldwater, Red, Nick Hornby, Slam, Penguin Podcast, podcast, Books, Penguin Books

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There's always a line outside Ginjer Buchanan's office. In order to snag this interview I had to wait next to a disgruntled werewolf detective and two interstellar pilots while Ginjer discussed business with someone within. It turned out to be a knight in black armor, who emerged with helmet bowed as he examined his contract. Seizing the moment, I slipped in ahead of the others and managed to conduct a quick interview before the werewolf battered down the door:

Hi, sorry to sneak in here unannounced. Could you tell us a little about yourself—how you came to enter publishing, and to your current position? How long have you had an interest in fantasy and science-fiction, and due to which books in particular?

Publishing was my mid-life career change. Prior to 1984, I was a social worker. I have an MSW and my undergrad degree is in psychology. But I had always been an avid reader, in general, and in specific of fantastical literature.

I’m from Pittsburgh, which has the best free library system in the country (thanks to Andrew Carnagie). Every week I would check out my allotted number of books, read them and return them for a new batch the next week! Authors I particularly enjoyed were CS Lewis, E Nesbitt, and PL Travers (the Mary Poppins book). I adored the American fantasist Edward Eager and, in a less fantastical vein, Walter Farley's Black Stallion and Island Stallion series. I also discovered one of the lesser known Stratemeyer series (the publishers of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys)--Rick Brandt’s Scientific Adventures. I think that the first book I actually owned was a Rick Brandt.

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You can probably name a few novelists or artists whom you call smart confidantes or friends. You draw on their writing for guidance at difficult crossroads--for sympathy or advice. After all, literature isn't only valuable because it's entertainment, but because it delivers memorable insight about life outside the book. We know more about love because of Shakespeare, about jealousy because of Tolstoy, about self-esteem because of Charlotte Bronte. Literature moves us for what it says about events outside of their plots.

My book, A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf, finds everyday wisdom in a novelist who tends to intimidate a lot of people (some call Woolf terribly obscure; some say she's too brooding, too heady). But Woolf was a genius in her ability to record the human heart. In her novels and diaries, she described what it's like to ride through the highs and lows of a mood--or to have a conversation, to feel longing as another person speaks. My book describes the insight she delivered about friendships, ambitions, and careers.

Ever since I pitched this book, I've been faced with the Big Question: "How can we learn about ‘the good life' from a woman who killed herself?" Virginia Woolf did commit suicide in 1941, partly as a response to World War Two, and partly because of biology. Hitler had started bombing London, and so Woolf grew increasingly pessimistic about humanity; she also suffered from what we retroactively diagnose as bipolar disorder. (The diagnosis wasn't defined during her lifetime.)

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Ilana Simons is our guest blogger during the week of November 26th. If you have any questions for Ilana Simons, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf: 

One of the most admired writers of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is as popular now as she ever was. In this remarkable book, award-winning professor Ilana R. Simons plumbs the depths of Woolf’s words and career, drawing on them to produce a lively and accessible guide to more fulfilling, more original living inspired by one of literature’s greatest observers of human nature. The result, beautifully packaged, is almost worthy of Woolf herself.

About Ilana Simons

Ilana Simons is currently a professor of English literature at The New School in New York City. She won the Willy Gorrissen Award for Teaching Excellence and the Molberger Fellowship for modernist scholarship while a graduate student at New York University. Simons is a moderator for the online Barnes & Noble Book Clubs. She is presently in training as a clinical psychologist.