The Moby Awards are the creature of the MobyLives book blog by the Hoboken-based Melville House Publishing. They celebrate the best (and worst) in a growing book-publishing trend — the book trailer. If movies can have them, then why can’t books?
The award for best foreign book trailer went to Sean Stanley for a video he created to promote Etcetera and Otherwise: A Lurid Odyssey. It comes complete with cameos from Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robertson Davies and Yann Martel, and gets rounded off with the decapitation of Michael Ondaatje. (Note: no authors were harmed in the making of this video.) I wrote a mini review of Etcetera and Otherwise last August. What I find surprising is that MobyLives didn’t mention Stanley’s previous book trailer which exhorted viewers to help a struggling author hire a sex-trade worker.