Tuesday July 31
PENNY
PINCHING: Just how bad are Canadian book superstore Indigo/Chapters'
finances? The company has pulled its annual sponsorship of this
year's Word on the Street literary festival, held in four cities.
CBC 07/30/01
CLASSIC
IGNORANCE: the absence of classical studies from contemporary
education is a bad thing, and it is time to argue that they should
be restored to a more salient place in the curriculum. Western
culture is so deeply imbued with its classical origins that a
proper appreciation of it is impossible without some knowledge
of these origins." New Statesman
07/30/01
ABOUT
ONE'S SELF: "The subject of autobiography is always self-definition,
but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like
the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because
engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally
it's the wisdom - or rather the movement towards it - that counts."
Chronicle of Higher Education 07/30/01
HUGHES ANTHOLOGY COMING:
"[T]he University of Missouri Press is placing a claim on
its native son by publishing for the first time the complete 'Collected
Works of Langston Hughes' in 18 volumes. The first three volumes
were published in June. The entire set will be available in time
for the centenary of his birth, Feb. 1, 2002." The New York Times 07/31/01
(one-time
registration required for access)
STILL GOING STRONG:
"Agatha Christie's name is synonymous with the arsenic-and-old-lace
school of whodunits. Modern mystery writers rarely praise her
or cite her work as an influence. She is not as writerly as Dorothy
Sayers or Robert Goddard, and her plots - often unfairly lumped
together - seem to boil down to 'Colonel Mustard with a candlestick
in the drawing room.' But in Great Britain she remains the best-selling
writer of all time, save for one William Shakespeare and God Herself,
author of the Bible." Boston
Globe 07/31/01
Monday July 30
THE
AMAZON PROBLEM: "The reason people my age are not ordering
more books on-line may have a purely mathematical explanation.
The number of books that we own, but have not yet read, and the
number of years we might reasonably expect to have left to read
them, do not quite add up." The
Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/30/01
Sunday July 29
TOP
SHELF: Want to get bookstore shelf space for that book you're
writing? Managers of the book retailer WH Smith have some advice:
"Jacket design and presentation matter in the modern book
market as they never have before. Publishers used to use jacket
design to denote their own particular brand, in the way that Penguin
still do with their Classics series. These days, though, jacket
design is more likely to identify the genre than the publisher."
The Observer (UK) 07/29/01
Friday July 27
BLACK
NOVELISTS HITTING THE BEST-SELLER LIST:"African-Americans
buy books that are relevant to their experience in greater numbers
than have ever been imagined by most publishers. It also appears
that book consumers are becoming more sophisticated, that they
want a good yarn well told, and that's more important than whether
the characters are black or white. So there's more and more crossover
readership." The New York Times 07/26/01
(one-time registration required for access)
THE
FIRST INFO AGE: The digital revolution of the Information
Age is changing the way we communicate and transmit information.
But arguably the first "Information Age" was more than
two millennia ago with the establishment of the great ancient
libraries... International Herald
Tribune 07/26/01
IT'S STORY
TIME. BRING YOUR OWN LAWYER: The intellectual rights arguments
have centered lately on e-books and Napster, but the next arena
may be your friendly neighborhood public library. Libraries see
the digital rights revolution as a limitation on their ability
to serve the public; publishers see it as an intrusion on their
copyrighted material. "As the two sides circle each other
warily, each is awaiting guidance from that long-delayed Copyright
Office study." Time 07/24/01
REYNOLDS
PRICE, ON EUDORA WELTY: "Her main pleasure toward the end
was the company of her friends. Surprisingly, for one whose work
is so marked by the keen double knife-edge of satire and remorseless
honesty, she was treated as the genial and polite Honorary Maiden
Aunt of American letters. No other maiden aunt in history can
have been, in her heart, less a maiden and less like the greeting-card
aunt of one's dreams. To almost the end, Eudora Welty was both
a fierce observer of the wide world around her and its loving
consumer." The New York Times 07/27/01
(one-time registration required
for access)
THE
CHIEF LEGAL COUNSEL DONE GONE: As chief legal counsel for
CNN, Eve Burton joined The New York Times and Dow Jones filing
a brief in support of a recent Houghton Mifflin book, The Wind
Done Gone. However, AOL-TimeWarner, which owns CNN, has come out
in opposition to publication of the book. Eve Burton is now the
former chief legal counsel for CNN, and the network's staffers
aren't happy about it. The New York
Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
DEPRESSION
CAN BE, WELL, DEPRESSING: Being published to high critical
praise and still being unknown might affect your outlook, as seems
to be the case with novelist Hugh Nissenson, who has battled severe
depression throughout his career. His latest work is a tale of
an artist who has had his destiny forced upon him by a world that
confuses technology with humanity. The
New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
Thursday July 26
THE
ILIAD FOR REAL? An expert on ancient Greece "combines
archeological evidence with hypotheses from various disciplines
and attempts to prove that Homer's Iliad was not the product
of one man's poetic imagination, inspired in the eighth century
B.C. by a few mysterious ruins from the dim and distant past."
Instead, he claims it is "the first written record of an
unbroken chain of oral tradition passed down in hexameters, preserving
the memory of a historical Trojan war that occurred during the
Bronze Age." Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung 07/26/01
IF
YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME: In the age of Amazon, Borders,
Chapters, and other chain book superstores, consumers have become
trapped between their desire to support local independents, and
their desire to find the book they want, in stock, right now.
Author Larry McMurtry is hoping to create the best of both worlds
when he opens his store in Archer City, Texas: "Booked Up"
will contain hundreds of thousands of books, all hand-picked for
quality, and will have a decidedly independent flavor. National
Post (Canada) 07/26/01
BEAUTIFUL
WRITERS WANTED, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY: "Increasingly
often, it would seem, attractive young writers are offered huge
advances for their books. Publishing today seems to be as much
about who you are, as what you write. But where does that leave
older writers?" BBC 07/26/01
Wednesday July 25
AOL
COULD BUY AMAZON: "AOL Time Warner would be allowed to
propose a takeover bid for Amazon.com -- as long as it did so
quietly -- under the terms of a $100 million investment AOL made
in Amazon Monday. According to records filed with the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and reported by Dow Jones Newswires,
AOL could propose a buyout, but not publicly and not without the
approval of Amazon.com." The
New York Times (AP) 07/25/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
Tuesday July 24
EUDORA
WELTY, 92: "She was one of the finest Southern writers
of the 20th century. She could be as obscure as William Faulkner.
As violent as Flannery O'Connor. As incisive as Richard Wright.
But more genteel and straightforward than just about anyone. And
at 92 she outlived them all." Washington
Post 07/24/01
Monday July 23
BEST-WHAT?
Does anybody really pay attention to Bestseller lists? "Nowadays
a 'bestseller' is more normally one of three things: a how–to
— usually, either about how to more efficiently grub for money
or how to lose weight while eating without pause; a memoir by
somebody really despicable; or a barely literate thriller where
gruesome things happen to people while they're having sex just
after drinking brand–name beverages." MobyLives
07/23/01
TYPECASTING:
Why do books have to conform to a genre, to be assigned to a category?
"Surely a piece of writing ought to be allowed to convey
its own generic intentions, and surely readers can be expected
to divine them without help?" Poets
& Writers 07/01
Sunday July 22
ENGLAND
AS A STATE OF MIND: George Orwell railed against the mid-20th-century
obsession with utopias. But ironically, "he appears today
- more than 50 years after his death - as one of the most persuasively
utopian writers who ever put pen to paper." Financial
Times 07/20/01
Thursday July 19
THE
BANISHING BOOKS: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle
Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe "have all put their
papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation's
most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book
Review, killed two pages." Do the papers think no one cares
about reading about books? Salon 07/19/01
FBI
ARRESTS RUSSIAN FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: Russian cryptographer
Dmitri Sklyarov, "one of the authors of a software package
released in June that breaks through e-book encryption developed
by Adobe Systems," was arrested in Las Vegas and charged
with violating copyright law. In Sklyarov's defense, the head
of his company claims
that "distributing Adobe's eBook software is illegal
in Russia, since Russian law requires that the software permit
the purchaser to make at least one legal copy."
International Herald Tribune & Electronic
Frontier Foundation 07/18/01
THE
PEN MAY NOT BE MIGHTIER THAN MEMORY OF THE SWORD: The new
book Ghost Soldiers, about the rescue of US prisoners being
tortured by Japanese during WW2, is a best seller in the US. In
Japan, the book is a pawn in "the tug-of-war between intellectuals
and internationalists who want Japan to own up to savage incidents
by its army, and nationalists and bureaucrats who seek to protect
the national psyche." Japan
Today 07/19/01
Wednesday July 18
E-OWNERSHIP:
Publisher Random House is appealing last week's court ruling that
said the publisher did not own e-book rights to books it publishes
on paper. "To demonstrate its confidence in its position,
Random House simultaneously announced that it would soon be releasing
e-book versions of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, as well
as nine Raymond Chandler novels." Inside.com
07/18/01
FOR
THE LOVE OF LEARNING: It's assumed today that the great working
class masses have little use for literature and intellectual pursuits.
A new book suggests that wasn't always the case. A century ago
"the working-class pursuit of education was not an accommodation
to middle-class values, a capitulation to bourgeois cultural hegemony.
Instead, it represented the return of the repressed in a society
where the slogan 'knowledge is power' was passionately embraced
by generations of working-class radicals who were denied both."
The Telegraph (UK) 07/16/01
Tuesday July 17
INTELLECTUAL
LIFE, UP IN THE TOWER AND DOWN IN THE MINES: We know what
people in the ivory tower want to read, but how about the - ahem
- working classes? Apparently they'd choose "exactly the
same Great Books to canonise, from the Odyssey to Dickens.
Indeed, on the evidence of the borrowing records from Welsh miners'
libraries, the only books that no one wants to read are the works
of the literary modernists." The
Guardian (UK) 07/14/01
IT'LL
BE A BEST-SELLER. NO, MAYBE IT WON'T. BUT ON THE OTHER HAND...
One of the
mystic joys, and constant frustrations, of book publishing is
that "it's a business used to operating in the dark. It's
the only business I know of in which market research is virtually
nonexistent. Every newspaper reader knows that A.I. sold
$30 million in tickets the weekend it opened. Magazines are audited;
television shows get Nielsen ratings. Why not put the book business
on a realistic footing?" The New York Times 07/17/01
(one-time registration required for access)
HOLDEN
CAULFIELD ON SOCIAL SECURITY: Holden Caulfield is 66, an age
not often considered a landmark. But that means Catcher in
the Rye is now 50, which is a landmark. Holden seems to be
holding up well; a quarter-million copies of the book are sold
every year. We guess that's good news for the author, J D Salinger,
but he's
not the sort to talk much. USA
Today & The Guardian (UK) 07/16/01
Monday July 16
CS
LEWIS - MASTER FRAUD? A new book about C.S. Lewis "contends
that several literary and theological works attributed to the
British author are, in fact, the product of systematic forgery.
Her arguments are well-known in Lewisian circles, where they have
provoked intense scholarly discussion, not to mention a certain
amount of litigation." Chronicle
of Higher Education 07/16/01
- THE
THREE FACES OF CS:
Lewis was a prolific author, publishing 40 books. "Indeed,
his published output sometimes appears to be the work of at
least three different authors." Chronicle
of Higher Education 07/16/01
THE
TALE OF TINA AND HARRY: It's not long ago that Tina Brown
and Harry Evans were the power literary couple in New York, she
running The New Yorker, he steering the fates of Random House.
A new book that hit bookshelves this weekend chronicles the couple's
rise to power: "they emerge from the book as a couple so
consumed by the naked ambition of the American arriviste, and
so willing to consume others as fuel for their flight, that their
crash from the heights of the sun became inevitable." National
Post (Canada) 07/16/01
LOOKING
GOOD: "Are an author's looks alone worthy of a half-million
dolllar advance? Do people really buy books — or magazines — because
the authors are young and skinny and resemble movie stars? Well,
they may get what they pay for if they do...MobyLives
07/16/01
Friday July 13
FEDERAL
JUDGE SAYS AUTHORS RETAIN E-BOOK RIGHTS: Citing "myriad
differences between traditional book publishing and publishing
in digital form," a US District Court judge has ruled, in
effect, that Rosetta Books is free to issue in e-book form works
by William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut. Random House, which holds
publication rights to the two authors, had asked for an injunction
against Rosetta. The ruling has potential for wide impact in the
publishing industry. New York
Law Journal 07/12/01
- Previously: E-BOOKS LAWSUIT:
"Authors and agents say what's at stake in the upcoming
lawsuit over interpretation of book contracts is the entire
future of the electronic publishing industry. In Random House
v. Rosettabooks...Random House alleges it owns the electronic
titles based on a clause in the author's original contracts
that gives the publisher the right to 'print, publish and sell
in book form." Wired 04/17/01
THE
ILIAD - TOO BORING? A British lottery-funded project
to donate a library of classic Great Books worth £3,000 to every
school in he country has hit an unexpected snag. Eleven schools
have refused the gift on the grounds that the books are either
too difficult or too boring. "One Edinburgh teacher complained
publicly that an early title, by the Greek historian Herodotus,
was 'far too boring'." The Guardian
(UK) 07/13/01
DEFENDING
THE WIND: Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone will show
up on The New York Times bestseller list this weekend.
This week she made an appearance at the Margaret Mitchell House
in Atlanta and got into an argument with an African American member
of the audience who tried to dispute Randall's assertion of Mitchell's
racism. Randall shouted at the woman: "My own mother was damaged
by this book and has all kinds of problems with racial identity.
You are my example of another generation of black women damaged
by Gone With the Wind!" Atlanta
Journal-Constitution 07/13/01
Thursday July 12
BUY
AUSSIE: "Between July 1988 and last December, Australians
paid about 44 per cent more for fiction paperbacks than US readers
and about 9 per cent more than British readers." But proposed
legislation to allow the free importing of books is opposed by
much of the Aussie book industry. Wonder why? Sydney
Morning Herald 07/12/01
THE DISAPPOINTMENTS
OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION: Modern novelists seem to have lost
- or quickly to lose - the basic skill of telling a common story
to common readers. When good story-tellers become successful,
their work "becomes thinner and thinner, more and more calculated
to appeal to that narrow and treacherous audience of critics,
booksellers, publicists and partygoers." The Guardian (UK) 07/08/01
BOOKS - THEY'RE
NOT JUST FOR GROWN-UPS ANY MORE: Know what kids are doing
more of these days? No, besides that. They're reading. A new study
shows them reading more than a book a month, on average, and "minority
teens may be reading the most of all." One of the books they're
reading may be the old sword
and sorcery stand-by Lord of the Rings. Sales of Tolkien's
classic are four times what they were last year, probably because
of hype for the movie, which is not due out for another five months.
Inside.com & Nando Times 07/11/01
"MP3"
IS OFFICIALLY A WORD. "RUOK" MAY BE NEXT: The latest
revision of the Concise Oxford Dictionary includes - and thereby
recognizes as words - "e-book" and "MP3" and
"i-Mode." It also includes - so far only in a separate
appendix - abbreviations used in mobile-phone text messages, and
smiley-face emoticons. Salon
07/11/01
SHORT LIST
FOR FORWARD PRIZE: Five poets have been short-listed for the
Forward £10,000 "Best Collection" poetry prize, largest
of its kind in Britain: Anne Carson, Douglas Dunn, Matthew Francis,
James Lasdun, and Sean O'Brien. Ten others are on "Best First
Collection" and "Best Single Poem" lists, with
smaller prizes. The Guardian
(UK)
A CHAPTER
OF ULYSSES FOR $1.2 MILLION: James Joyce's multi-colored
hand manuscript of the "Eumaus" chapter of Ulysses
was auctioned at Sotheby's for £861,250 ($1,216,360). That was
less than had been projected, based on last December's sale of
another draft chapter, which went for $1.5 million. The
Guardian (UK) 07/10/01
Wednesday July 11
THE
LION, THE WITCH, AND THAT GUY FROM MARKETING: With the success
of the Harry Potter franchise, the folks who hold the rights to
C.S. Lewis's classic "Narnia" series have begun to think
about new ways of marketing the series, which is filled with magic
and Christian imagery. But fans of Aslan and the White Witch are
appalled at what they see as a naked effort to strip the "Narnia"
books of their childish charm and to remove as much of the religion
as possible. Minneapolis Star Tribune
(NYT News Service) 07/11/01
NEW
WORK FROM AN OLD DISSIDENT: "Along with other secrets
about spies and agents and assassinations and conspiracies, the
archives of the former Soviet Union may contain a literary secret:
an unpublished novel by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. Babel,
the author of the 'Red Cavalry' stories and 'Odessa Tales,' was
arrested in 1939 and executed in the basement of the Lubyanka
Prison in Moscow in 1940." The
New York Times 07/11/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
POETIC
OBSCURITY: The collapse of American poetry into the black
hole of academic obscurity is a process that has been occurring
for half a century. At the beginning of the 21st century, the
contrast between the relative health of poetry in Britain and
its dire condition in the US is striking." Prospect
07/01
TOUGH
E-SELL: "For a variety of reasons, some of journalism's
biggest names are entering the e-book market." But publishers
are finding it tough to make money from any of the books.
Publishers Weekly 07/10/01
75
OF THE WORST WORDS EVER WRITTEN: The winner of this year's
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which honors (intentionally) bad
writing, is a 44-year-old secretary from Vancouver with what appears
to be a fixation on small, yappy dogs. In keeping with the style
of winners from past years, the winning entry is a ridiculous
run-on sentence with more indecipherable metaphor than you can
shake a stick at. Cleveland Plain
Dealer 07/11/01
Tuesday July 10
MISSING
HARRY: Barnes & Noble reports its sales are up 4.2 percent
over last year for the first part of this year. But "although
book sales are running well ahead of Street estimates for the
quarter to date, the unfavorable comparison to last year's Harry
Potter phenomenon is expected to produce negative comparable sales
for the month of July." The New York Times 07/10/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
MONEY ISN'T
EVERYTHING. RELATIVELY SPEAKING, THAT IS: She's written only
one story. Must have been a good one; The New Yorker published
it. Book publishers started throwing money at her - $500,000,
in one case. She turned down the half million, and accepted a
$100,000 offer from Ecco Press, which publishes such luminaries
as Edmund White and Czeslaw Milosz. Inside.com
07/09/01
REALLY
GOOD BAD WRITING IS AN ART: Every year the Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest "honours the writer who comes up with the
worst beginning to an imaginary novel." This year's winning
entry describes Desdemona, who decides "(as blood filled
her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd)
that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was
a stupid idea."
Sunday July 8
SO,
UM, MADONNA'S A POET? Ever since rock music began to get all
heavy back in the protest era of the 1960s, the question of whether
the lyrics of some songs can be counted as poetry has troubled
musicians and poets alike. Norman Mailer says no, but the Beatles
said yes, and these days, as poetry continues to experience an
extended boom, the musicians may have won the argument simply
by outlasting the naysayers. The New
York Times 07/08/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
Friday July 6
BIG
IS BEAUTIFUL: If someone had described today's book superstores
20 years ago, most book lovers would have thought it was a vision
of utopia - long hours, tons of books, comfortable surroundings.
So "why, then, the chorus of disapproval from the cultural
elite? Why the characterization, spread by a vocal group of critics,
of the chain bookstores as a sort of intellectual McDonald's,
a symbol of the dumbing-down and standardization of American life?"
The Atlantic 07/01
NO
SIGN, NO WORK: The National Writers Union plans to sue big
publishers such as the New York Times challenging the "legality
of the Times's policy requiring writers to waive their rights
as a condition of getting new work." Inside.com
07/05/01
VARIATIONS
ON A THEME BY TWAIN: "Mark Twain made a deal with the
editor of the Atlantic Monthly more than a century ago: He would
write a story, then ask other well-known authors to compose their
own versions from the same outline. Editor William Dean Howells
agreed to publish all of the stories in his literary magazine.
No one took up the challenge -- until now." National
Post (Canada) (AP) 07/06/01
Thursday July 5
OF
E-LOANS AND INCENTIVES: A number of American public libraries
have begun lending e-books. "The services may be every bibliophile's
dream, but publishing houses worry that the lending programs will
cannibalize their revenue and destroy financial incentives for
popular writers. Why would people want to pay for an e-book when
they could borrow one free just as easily?" Washington
Post 07/04/01
MAKE
WAY FOR CONTROVERSY: "Young fans of Make Way for Ducklings
are battling Dr. Seuss loyalists for the title of "official children's
book" of Massachusetts. In one corner is Robert McCloskey's 1941
tale of a mother mallard shepherding her ducklings through Boston's
narrow cobblestone streets to safety in the Public Garden. In
the other are devotees of Dr. Seuss' whimsical neologisms and
looping rhymes. Passions are running high on both sides."
Chicago Tribune 07/05/01
REMEMBERING
MORDECHAI: Mordechai Richler's books were selling briskly
Wednesday as Canadians remembered one of the country's best-known
writers. "He gives you a nostalgic feeling of the good old days
when immigrants were building up the city, building up the country."
Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/04/01
- IN
HIS OWN WORDS: Mordecai Richler's last column for a Canadian
newspaper shows much of his trademark wit and self-deprecating
attitude towards his chosen profession.
National Post 07/05/01
Wednesday July 4
MORDECHAI
RICHLER, 70: Mordechai Richler, one of Canada's best-known
writers, has died of cancer. "The Quebec author of 10 novels
is best known for his works on Montreal Jewish life." Ottawa
Citizen (CP) 07/03/01
MEASURING
BOOK SALES: A new more accurate measure of book sales is coming.
That's good, right? Maybe - but it's likely to turn the book business
on its ear. For example, romance novels, which don't make it onto
the Bestseller lists now, are likely to come roaring up as a category.
And other categories...Sure you want to hear this? Inside.com
07/03/01
THE NAPSTER OF
BOOKS: A week ago, "Barnes & Noble.com, the No. 1
U.S. online book store, halted the sale of electronic books after
Russian company Elcomsoft began selling a program to illegally
copy text." Adobe, which makes software for e-books, put
pressure on the Russian company. Result: the Russians quit selling
their software. Now they give it away free. The Moscow Times 07/04/01
YOU GOTTA
START SOMEPLACE. MIGHT AS WELL BE THE TOP: Nell Freudenberger
got a job at The New Yorker. The magazine published one
of her stories. Now she's juggling six-figure offers for a collection
of her stories. Her only problem seems to be that, so far, the
published story is the only one she's written. Inside.com 07/03/01
Tuesday July 3
THE FUTURE
OF BOOKS MAY BE... BOOKS: E-books, beware. There's a man out
there with a machine that can print and bind and deliver a book
in minutes. "The high-speed printer spits out double-sided
pages in rapid succession. The sheets are clamped, glued, covered,
and sheared. Watching the book move along is a bit like watching
a doughnut go through a Krispy Kreme machine. In seven minutes,
I am holding a finished book, its spine still warm from the hot
glue. I fan the pages and giggle. 'Yeah, it's a book, a real book'."
Business2.com
USING
NEW TECHNOLOGY TO STRENGTHEN THE OLD: "Instead of dampening
the sales of books, the Internet actually has sparked interest,
through the expansion of online book clubs and chat rooms. These
clubs are fast becoming the author's - and publisher's - best
friend, by combining the old-fashioned notion of word-of-mouth
with high technology." Atlanta
Journal-Constitution 07/02/01
KNOW
WHAT YOU WRITE:To write about life in a small village
330 years ago, it helps to know about life in a small village
now. "I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled
fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes
on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings
that flourish in small communities." The New York Times 07/02/01
(one-time
registration required for access)
Monday July 2
WHAT'S
WRONG WITH TODAY'S FICTION: BR Myers writes in the current
Atlantic Monthly that stars of the contemporary writing
establishment have lost their way [the piece is not online]. Critic
Jonathan Yardley heartily agrees: "Myers looks back, as I
too most certainly do, 'to a time when authors had more to say
than 'I'm a writer!'; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption
for the photograph on the inside jacket.' He notes with dismay
the disdain in which such fiction is now held in proper literary
circles, where the pretentious display of self-consciously 'writerly'
prose is valued while plot, narrative and character are scorned."
Washington Post 07/02/01
LOOKING
GOOD... Do an author's looks sell books? "It's a closed-doors
secret in contemporary American publishing, but the word is leaking
out. Not that you have to resemble Denzel Washington or Cameron
Diaz, but if you can write well and you possess the haute cheekbones
of Susan Minot, the delicate mien of Amy Tan or the brooding ruggedness
of Sebastian Junger, your chances are much greater." Washington
Post 07/02/01
Sunday July 1
WHO
SAYS YOU CAN'T BUY LOVE? "Basel, rich in art-loving patrons,
offered a sum of 30,000 Swiss francs for a "modern city novel."
The only specifications were that it be written in German and
reveal "intensive preoccupation" with the city. Some 107 authors,
almost a quarter of them from Germany, submitted outlines and
text samples. And the winner is..." Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung 06/29/01
HOME
|