Friday August 31
TO
BUY A MOCKINGBIRD? "'To Kill a Mockingbird,' the book
chosen by the Chicago Public Library for all Chicagoans to read
in September and early October, is moving up the best-seller lists
at two major Internet bookstores. Amazon.com reported that the
mass market paperback edition of 'Mockingbird' jumped Wednesday
to 67th on its best-seller list from a ranking the day before
of 324th, out of more than 2 million titles carried by the company.
Meanwhile, at Barnes&Noble.com, that same edition of 'Mockingbird'
held 63rd place out of more than a million titles in the store's
inventory." Chicago Tribune 08/31/01
Thursday August 30
ANY
BOOK FOR FREE: Napster-type programs now make downloading
books easy and free. "It took a National Post reporter 30
minutes to navigate Gnutella, find Stephen King's 1984 work Thinner
on the network and download the novel. Printing the book required
another 15 minutes. In addition to best-sellers written by such
authors as King and Rowling, the most widely pirated books online
are science fiction novels and computer manuals."
National Post 08/30/01
REMEMBERING
DAME EDNA:
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry,
and one of the few who made a lot of money from it. Admirers,
editors, and lovers lined up for her. She was a stunning, charismatic
figure once regarded as a giant of American letters. Today she's
nearly forgotten, a footnote. A couple of new biographies attempt
to revive her reputation. The New York Times 08/30/01
(one-time registration required for access)
Wednesday August
29
BAD
HISTORY: Five years ago a prize was set up in Australia for
outstanding history-writing for kids. Trouble is, for the second
time in five years the jury has declined to name even a shortlist
of finalists for the prize, saying no books met the standard of
excellence and that "many of the works were mired in a monocultural
vision of Australia." So why is this so hard? Sydney
Morning Herald 08/29/01
E-BOOK HACKER
INDICTED: "A Russian computer programmer and his employer
were indicted Tuesday on charges of violating digital copyright
protections. Dmitry Sklyarov and ElComSoft Co. Ltd. were charged
for writing a program that lets users of Adobe Systems' eBook
Reader get around copyright protections imposed by electronic-book
publishers. The indictment was the first under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, which forbids technology that circumvents copyright
protections."
Salon 08/29/01
Tuesday August 28
ONE
BOOK AT A TIME: Officials of the city of Chicago are trying
to the the whole city to read the same book at the same time.
And the book? Harper Lee's 1961 classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
"Libraries throughout the city have braced for an onslaught
by putting more than 4,000 copies of the book on their shelves,
including Spanish and Polish translations. Bookstores reported
sharp increases in sales even before the seven-week project was
officially begun on Saturday." The
New York Times 08/28/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
READING
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN MARKET: For decades, large publishing
houses in the US paid scant attention to the interests of African-American
readers. Then in 1992, everything just changed. That year, Terry
MacMillan published Waiting to Exhale, and for a time,
she, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were simultaneously top-selling
authors." Since then "seven publishing imprints dedicated
to books by black authors have been created or revived by major
publishing houses." Christian
Science Monitor 08/28/01
THE
NEXT BIG THING GUY: Jonathan Franzen is being set up by the
publishing establishment as literature's Next Big Thing. In the
run-up to his next book, the New York Times Magazine is
publishing an excerpt this weekend, he's got an essay in the next
New Yorker, and the film rights were just auctioned off
for a ton of money. "So would it make a difference if someone
told you that Franzen isn't just another self-conscious young
author with a hip, po-mo sensibility; that he is an assured, seriously
funny writer with a generosity and breadth of vision unusual for
his generation?" The Globe &
Mail (Canada0 08/28/01
Monday August 27
DEFINING
THE READER: Is being a reader cool? Nah - "It's like
being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint
sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish
is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting
along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world."
Washington Post 08/26/01
Friday August 24
WHAT'S
WITH THE CHICK LIT? Booker Prize favorite author Beryl Bainbridge
blasts the current "chick lit" genre of the Bridget
Jones variety. "It's a pity that so many young women are writing
like that. I wonder if they are just writing like this because
they think they are going to get published." The
Age (Melbourne) 08/24/01
Thursday August 23
DOWNLOADABLE
READING: E-pirates are ripping off books online. "More
than 7,000 copyrighted books are available for free on the Internet,
including works by J.K. Rowling, John Grisham and Stephen King."
CBC 08/22/01
WHO
RULES PUBLISHING: It's simplistic yes, but "there are
a handful of people whose influence affects your reading choices
in ways you never would've guessed. Each of them, to some degree,
represents his or her peers. But among the blockbuster authors
who help support entire publishing houses, powerful literary agents
who fight tooth and nail for their clients' deals, Hollywood moguls
who often bring us back to the books from which they made their
hits and gatekeepers you've probably never heard of," there
is a small group of such powerful publishing figures. Book
Magazine 08/01
Wednesday August
22
NY
PUBLIC LIBRARY GETS KEROUAC: The New York Public Library has
acquired Jack Kerouac's literary and personal archive. "The
archive, the largest Kerouac holding in any institution, contains
manuscripts, notebooks, letters, journals and personal items saved
from the time he was 11 until his death at 47 in 1969."
The New York Times 08/22/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
PENGUIN
THINKS E-BOOKS WILL BE COOL: Even Stephen King hasn't succeeded
with e-publishing his novels, but book publisher Penguin is giving
it a try anyway. Some 200 titles, including Jane Austen's Emma,
will be available at the Penguin site. Often lost in the debates
over the feasibility of e-books is that old-timer (in Internet
terms) Project Gutenberg, which offers free downloads
of thousands of public domain works, including Jane Austen's Emma.
The Guardian (UK) 08/21/01
Tuesday August 21
HIT
THE ROAD JACK: "Two decades ago, the author book tour
was almost a novelty. Today it can be the deciding factor in a
book’s success. Touring has always been as much about selling
the author as the book. Turn the author into a traveling salesman,
and those personal appearances generate real sales—important when
a few thousand books can make a best seller—not to mention media
attention on local radio and television and reviews in the local
press." Newsweek 08/27/01
SLIPPERY
SLOPE? The California State University system has struck a
deal with an e-publisher to offer multiple copies of electronic
books at one time. "Previously, a single copy of an e-book
bought for an electronic-library could only be borrowed by one
reader at a time - just like a print book. But an the arrangement
with NetLibrary, half of the 1,500 e-books Cal State has purchased
– at no additional cost - will have unrestricted use for multiple
borrowers." Wired 08/21/01
Monday August 20
INDEPENDENT'S
DAY: While Canadian book superstore Chapters has been mired
in financial difficulties, and independent bookstores have been
closing at a frightening pace, one Toronto independent is thriving.
"Next month Book City celebrates 25 years in business with
five branches around Toronto employing 71 staff, that move approximately
800,000 books and magazines annually." Toronto
Star 08/18/01
POLITICS
OF LITERATURE (AND CRITICISM): Why do we get the literature
we get today? "A lot of today's 'literary' writing is repetitious,
inexact, dull and clichéd. It is also highly formulaic, as witness
the success of overblown nurse novels like Cold Mountain
and The English Patient. But the most important point .
. . has to do with the failure of the critical establishment.
How can one explain reviewers gushing over trash it's hard to
believe they've even read? Why do literary awards so often go
to pretentious pulp?" Good Reports
08/18/01
Sunday August 19
ALL
ABOUT ME: For years the British publishing market has been
dominated by the memoir. "But there's a growing feeling that
the memoir's hold on the literary market place has had a damaging
effect on adjacent genres. Pieces of prose that in the 1980s would
have been sent out into the world as novels have more recently
been packaged as the Story of Me." The
Observer (UK) 08/19/01
QUEEN
OF LETTERS: Felicia Ackerman, a professor of philosophy at
Brown University, is a NYTimes letters junkie. "Since 1991,
the Times has published seventy-four of her epistles, including
six so far this year. And were it not for the Times's notorious
stringency, readers would see far more of Ackerman: She estimates
that for every letter that runs, she's written three or four others."
Lingua Franca 09/01
Friday August 17
PRETENSIONS
TO QUALITY? Are American literary writers too full of themselves?
Do they fail to make sense? Are American readers "gullible
morons" who don't know good from bad? The debate is joined.
The Guardian (UK) 08/16/01
BOOKING
OUT: A Saskatchewan library is looking to give away half of
its collection - about 100,000 books - and in the meantime is
shipping the books to a warehouse thousands of miles away. "The
Chief Librarian says circulation has dropped from 150,000 books
per year to just 5,000." CBC
08/16/01
REAL
KIDS' PLAY: The Children's Book Council of Australia is announcing
this year's children's literature awards. "Loss, betrayal,
death, racism, violence and fear are common issues in this year's
list of winners." The Age (Melbourne)
08/17/01
Thursday August 16
BOOKER
LONGLIST: For the first time ever, the longlist of finalists
for the Booker Prize, the UK's most prestigious literary award,
has been made public. Booker officials "believe revealing
the longlist will put an end to speculation over how it is compiled."
The Guardian (UK) 08/15/01
- BOOKER
NOMINEES: Here's a complete list of the 24 nominees for
this year's Booker Prize. Toronto
Star 08/15/01
- HANDICAPPING
THE B'r: Beryl Bainbridge
is the bookmakers' favourite for the Booker. BBC
08/16/01
...AND
NE'ER (WELL, SELDOM) THE TWAIN SHALL MEET: Why don't literary
novels appeal to more readers, the way genre novels do? They aren't
intended to, because "people who write serious fiction seek
the high opinion of other literary novelists, of creative writing
teachers and of reviewers and critics. They want very badly to
be 'literary,' and for many of them this means avoiding techniques
associated with commercial and genre fiction."
Salon 08/16/01
- Previously:
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
ANGELA'S COATTAILS:
Jacket blurbs - those sound-bite-sized endorsements writers give
one another for publicity - actually can boost sales of a book.
That's particularly true if the blurber is well-known, or has
recently had a very successful book. One of the best and most
prolific is Frank McCourt, who blurbs at the rate of half a dozen
a year. Slate 08/13/01
Wednesday August
15
LIKE
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT: The real China is enormous,
complex, and elusive; writers tackle it at their peril. "Chinese
authors who went into exile dominate perceptions of Chinese literature
in western markets, but are largely ignored in China itself. Writers
in China accuse the exiles of pandering to western fantasies."
The Economist 08/09/01
"REALITY
TV" IS RUINING NOVELS, TOO: One of Britain's leading
novelists complains that "The vogue for confessional novels,
and the pressure on writers to sell their work with some tantalising
revelation from their personal lives, is killing serious fiction.
The trend toward a culture of 'de-fictionalisation', driven partly
by the mania for reality TV, [is] cheapening the art of the novel."
The Guardian (UK) 08/13/01
Tuesday August 14
SELF-PUBLISHING
INCREASE: Prices of on-demand self-published books are going
up - as much as 30 percent. Authors aren't so concerned about
changes in their royalties as they are that higher prices will
mean fewer buyers. Wired 08/14/01
Monday August 13
THIS
BOOK WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN... E-books are still a tough sell.
But one publisher has an idea to sell electronic books and save
it from being copied. RosettaBooks will sell a timed copy of an
Agatha Christie book - $1 buys you twn hours of reading until
the book is automatically erased. Planet
eBook 08/10/01
Friday August 10
READING
NATION: Australia's book publishers sold 126 million books
worth $1.2 billion last year. That total was a 13 percent increase
over 1997/98. The Age (Melbourne)
08/10/01
NEXT
HARRY: JK Rowling denies writer's block. "There is no writer's
block; on the contrary, I am writing away very happily. I made
it clear last summer that I wanted to take the time to make sure
that book five was not dashed off to meet a deadline, but was
completed to my full satisfaction as its predecessors have been."
New Zealand Herald 08/08/01
Thursday August 9
HOPING
FOR A NEW HARRY: Is JK Rowling suffering from writer's block?
There's been no new Harry Potter installment this year, but "the
previous four books were produced once a year since 1997."
BBC 08/09/02
THE
CHANGING POST: Making fun of the New York Post, with its exuberant
headlines and slavish devotion to celebrity has long been a New
York tradition. The Post "showed up on newsstands
each morning representing a coherent whole — reflecting and defining,
in its own unique way, how the city saw itself." Now, with
a new editor, it "looks and feels a little like a giant prawn
out of water: foreign, a little disoriented, not quite the defining
homegrown newspaper it was." New
York Observer 08/09/01
Wednesday August
8
20
YEARS OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Sure, Martin Amis and Salman
Rushdie are important writers. So are Ian McEwan Julian Barnes.
But those four have dominated the British literary scene since
the seventies. Are there no new voices coming along, or are readers
- and editors - too lazy to find them? The
Guardian (UK) 08/06/01
CONRAD,
DINESEN, HEMINGWAY. THEY DID NOT KNOW AFRICA: But what writer
does? Toni Morrison thinks Camara Laye does, in The Radiance
of the King. In it, he "not only summoned a sophisticated,
wholly African imagistic vocabulary in which to launch a discursive
negotiation with the West, he exploited with technical finesse
the very images that have served white writers for generations."
New York Review of Books 08/09/01
JORGE
AMADO, 88: Jorge Amado was Brazil's most popular
and most successful novelist; his 32 books have sold millions
of copies in more than 40 languages. Perhaps his best known -
at home and abroad - was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,
which sold two million copies in Brazil alone. Amado had been
in ill health for several years. The
New York Times 08/07/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
POETRY
CON: Ravi Desai pledged millions of dollars for poetry programs
at major American universities. But after fanfare over the gifts
died down, Desai failed to come through with the money. "Most
business cons are for riches. This was a con whose payoff was
to rub shoulders with poets. What did he gain, except for an engraved
ax?" Poets & Writers 08/01/01
Tuesday August 7
NO
OLD WORDS: Is it more difficult for older writers to get published?
Even long-established writers are having difficulty. “I think
it is virtually impossible now for any novelist over the age of
30 to get published. Publishers are not interested because their
editors are all aged about 12 and they only want books by girls
in their twenties, particularly if they are pretty."
The Times (UK) 08/07/01
POETRY
AND THE SEX SCANDAL: England's poet laureate is usually a
pretty safe choice, a feel-good appointment to promote poetry
and not meant to push boundaries or provoke controversy. But then
a student accused the current poet laureate of sexual harassment
and - "oh dear. A sex scandal. Well, nearly a sex scandal.
All right, a scandal about sex but with no sex. Certainly no Blue
Dress. Please." Salon
08/07/01
THAT'LL
LEARN THEM YANKEE SNOBS: "On Saturday in Seattle, a team
of four Dallas poets won the 12th annual National Poetry Slam
before a sold-out audience in the 2,000-seat Paramount Theatre.
It was the first time a Texas team ever won the publicly judged
contest of spoken poetry, taking away bragging rights, a trophy
and $2,000 in prize money." Dallas
Morning News 08/07/01
FINDING
A NICHE FOR TEENS: Bookstores have a distinctly adult feel
to them these days - coffee bars, endless magazine racks, and
entire sections devoted to memoirs of retired New Yorker
writers do not exactly bring in droves of adolescents, and most
stores seem to like it that way. But there is still a thriving
market for the "Young Adult" book, and it is centered
online, where teens can not only buy the latest titles, but discuss
them in open forums. Wired 08/07/01
COULD
SOMEONE FETCH MR. CLINTON $10 MIL? "Former President
Clinton has agreed to write his memoirs for Alfred A. Knopf, the
publisher announced Monday, in a deal expected to involve one
of the biggest advances ever for a nonfiction book. The book is
expected to be out in 2003." Ottawa
Citizen (AP) 08/06/01
Monday August 6
LETTERS
SPECULATE ON PLATH'S DEATH: ""A set of unpublished letters
written by the late former poet laureate Ted Hughes - including
one blaming anti-depressants for Sylvia Plath's suicide - have
been acquired by the British Library. The collection of over 140
letters and other documents were written to literary critic, biographer
and friend of Hughes, Keith Sagar, over a period of nearly 30
years." BBC 08/06/01
RESEARCHING
THE OBVIOUS:As publishers have poured more and more money
into the development of what everyone hopes will eventually be
the lucrative e-book market, the public has reacted with marked
indifference. Publishers, naturally, would like to know why this
is. So far, the evidence seems to point to the good old-fashioned
comfort factor of holding a real, bound, pages-and-glue book in
one's hands, and knowing that it will never require a call to
technical support. Boston Globe 08/06/01
BE
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: The city of Chicago is launching
a program designed to get everyone in the city to read the same
book at the same time, in an effort to promote reading and literacy.
Mayor Richard Daley has selected his favorite book, Harper Lee's
classic To Kill A Mockingbird, for the program. Trouble
is, Mockingbird is not the sweet, syrupy days-of-yesteryear
tome that many adults choose to remember, and in today's ultra-charged
climate of racial politics, some are worried that the book's language
and style may offend.Chicago Tribune
08/06/01
READING
IS BELIEVING:Victor Hugo is widely considered to be the greatest
French poet of the 19th century by scholars and lay readers alike.
But aside from repeated viewings of the musical version of Les
Miserables, most English speakers have never had much of a chance
to judge Hugo's work for themselves, most of his work having never
been well-translated. A new collection aims to change all that.The
Weekly Standard 08/06/01
Sunday August 5
UNUSUAL
DEMOGRAPHICS: A new women's magazine has begun publication
in the Netherlands. Mainline Lady has all the hallmarks
of glossy rags like Cosmo and Vogue, but with a
distinct marketing and content twist: the new publication is aimed
at heroin addicts. Really. And it's backed by the national health
ministry. Seriously. And the editors don't sound particularly
eager for their readers to kick their deadly habit. The
Age (Melbourne) 08/05/01
Friday August 3
PRICE
OF POPULARITY: As African American literature goes mainstream,
some questions: "Whom do black authors write for, and who
should our audience be? Will the imprints of the major houses—newly
geared up to reach a broad black readership—release mediocre work
and ghettoize the literary marketplace, or will they prove a boon
for black voices?" Village Voice
08/01/01
Thursday August 2
EXPERIMENTAL
NON-FICTION? SOUNDS ODD: It is odd, in the sense that it's
uncommon and defies categorization. Much of it is gathered under
the hazy rubric "creative non-fiction," popular in college
writing programs. "It is an academic refashioning of what
used to be New Journalism, that explosion of journalistic self-confidence...
Universities report that more than 70% of people studying creative
non-fiction want to write autobiography." The Guardian (UK) 07/28/01
- Previously: 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
BEEN
THERE, DONE THAT, MOVIN' ON: "For as long as people have
been writing about their journeys, they have been telling tales
of the strange and the wondrous... The names of places change,
the conveyances become faster, the duration of the journey grows
briefer - but the most accomplished travel writers know that the
stories they tell follow the same patterns as did the stories
heard or read centuries before, the stories that made them leave
home in the first place." The
New Republic 08/01/01
WHODUNIT?
IT MAY HAVE BEEN THE AUTHOR: Those people running around in
deerstalker hats smoking pipes in Dartmoor this week were celebrating
the 100th anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound
of the Baskervilles, arguably the best-known Sherlock Holmes
story. But did Conan Doyle even write the story? A historian charges
that Doyle
stole the story from his lover's husband, then helped kill
the man to cover his tracks. If nothing else, it would make a
good mystery story. BBC 08/02/01
Wednesday August
1
HOW
TO WRITE: You see them in every bookstore, those books that
promise to teach you how to write. "Evidently there exists
a widespread belief that the good ol' Yankee can-do spirit - the
kind that helps you to learn how to puff a soufflé or lay a garden
path - extends to an imaginative realm like novel-writing."
If only it were so easy... Opinion
Journal 07/27/01
HOLDEN
CAULFIELD TURNS 50. DON'T YOU FEEL OLD? "It was 50 years
ago that J.D. Salinger first published Catcher in the Rye and
ever since, people have been calling the book's narrator, Holden
Caulfield, their hero. Reading about Holden's three-day "madman"
odyssey in New York City has changed people's lives. They've identified
with his struggles and his longing for the innocence of youth.
But the book was published in a different time, when the nature
of innocence was a very different thing." National
Post (Canada) 08/01/01
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