Friday November 30
IN
AN INSTANT: Get ready for a big slug of books related to 9-11.
"They are known in the trade as 'instant books'- publications
that are fast-tracked through a traditionally sluggish editorial
process in a bid to feed the public's appetite for fresh information.
The 1997 death of Princess Diana was the last time the market's
hunger for instant books was so voracious."
The Age (Melbourne) 11/30/01
THE
LONELIEST CRITICS: Book critics are having a hard time these
days. Many papers are eliminating stand-alone book review sections,
more and more authors are striking back at reviewers who displease
them, and, let's face it, a lot of people simply don't do a lot
of reading these days. So are book reviews still relevant, or
even necessary? Gulp. The Globe &
Mail (Toronto) 11/30/01
A
SEPARATE PASSING: Author John Knowles has died at the age
of 75. His classic novel of wartime and adolescent conflict, A
Separate Peace, has been required reading since its publication
in 1959. Nando Times (AP) 11/30/01
Thursday November
29
BEST-SELLING
BOY POET: "Who could possibly have conjured the idea
that two of the biggest word-of-mouth best sellers of the year
would be written by a boy who is 11 years old? A boy suffering
a chronic, life-threatening disease? And both of them books of
poetry? There is something irresistibly appealing about how undaunted
this boy has been in creating his art, a particularly dreamy story
for a season that is supposed to be jolly but will be somewhat
less so this year for many people."
The New York Times 11/29/01
(one-time registration required for access)
ECONOMICS
OF CANADIANISM: Canadian writers are hot these days. They're
also heavily subsidized. With the Canadian dollar at a deep discount
to the American, Canadian writing is cheap. It's now to the point
where it costs less to read Canadian than American. On top of
this, must we also have national chauvinism?
National Post (Canada) 11/26/01
THE
BIGGEST BLOWHARD: Call it Dork Wars, if you like. The intellectual
battles between New York literary giants of the mid-20th century
have become legend in an age where highbrow figures are no longer
in the public eye as they once were. But of all the blustering
minds the wars brought to the cultural fore, none was more disputatious,
more ready for a fight, than Dwight Macdonald. A new collection
of letters illustrates the point. National
Post (Canada) 11/29/01
Wednesday November
28
POETIC
PERSISTENCE: Forty years ago, Alan Dugan won the National
Book Award for poetry. A couple weeks ago, he won it again. Along
the way - like most poets - he had some lousy jobs. And along
the way - like all good poets - he kept on writing. "There
are 345 poems in his book, which seems like a lot, but he says,
'That's not so many for someone who is 78 years old'."
Boston Globe 11/28/01
Tuesday November
27
FIRST
REACTIONS: Writers have been rushing to weigh in with reactions
to the events of Sepetmber 11. "Usually it takes years for
any culture to come to artistic terms with an event that has shocked
and changed it. War and Peace came decades after the Napoleonic
Wars. We are still obsessing about the Second World War. But something
different is at work now. No one seems the least bit worried about
making instant artistic judgments that could look plain silly
once we agree how to remember this strange autumn." The
Times (UK) 11/27/01
LITERARY
PRIZE WITHHELD: "A controversy has broken out over the
most important literary prize in the Dutch-speaking world after
the winner - the 77-year-old Dutch author Gerard Reve - was prevented
from picking up the award because his homosexual partner is under
investigation for a sexual incident involving a young boy."
The Guardian (UK) 11/26/01
THE
FIRST BILLIONAIRE AUTHOR: JK Rowling is on her way to becoming
the world's first billionaire author. She's sold 124 million books,
but the real money is coming from numerous merchandising deals.
"Rowling received an advance of around $3000 (US) for the
first story of her schoolboy wizard hero, ahead of publication
in 1997. Her negotiating position has strengthened immeasurably
since then." The
Age (Melbourne) 11/27/01
LINING
UP HEAVYWEIGHT NOVELISTS: "Phyllis Grann, former CEO
of Penguin Putnam, is heading to Random House Inc. as vice chairman.
Most observers believe the move sets the stage for a titanic struggle
for star authors such as Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell with
her old employer. Grann is also credited with helping shape the
careers of other strong-selling authors, including Robin Cook,
Dick Francis, Alice Hoffman, Nora Roberts and Amy Tan."
New York Post 11/27/01
BOOKS THAT WRITERS
READ: "Every once in a while, a rumor burns through the
tentative, decentralized community of American writers that a
certain book must be owned. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage, a new collection by Alice Munro, her tenth,
has already incited writers to call one another on the telephone,
to send e-mail exhortations, and — in the extreme (writers are
not profligate) — to pay retail for more than one copy in order
to give the book away." The
Atlantic Monthly December 2001
Monday November 26
THE
MEANING OF AWARDS: Everyone assumes that winning a big literary
award helps the sales of a book. But how much? "After four
years of effort, Bookscan has managed for the first time to sign
up enough bookstores to make a credible measurement of the award's
impact on a book's sales before and after." The answer is
- if the book is not well-known before the award it can help enormously
- this year's National Book Award poetry winner sold 12 times
as many books the week after winning. But sales of Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections, already the talk of the season, were unchanged
from the previous week. The New York
Times 11/26/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
JOYCE
CLEAN-UP NO-NO: A new edition of James Joyce's Ulysses
that cleaned up punctuation mistakes has been ruled in violation
of copyright by British courts. "The Reader's Edition
of Ulysses, published in the UK by Macmillan, included spelling
and punctuation corrections, and some unpublished material. But
the Joyce estate said the new material, taken from archive manuscripts,
was protected by copyright and should not have been published."
BBC 11/23/01
Sunday November 25
SONTAG
CANCELS ADELAIDE: Susan Sontag was scheduled to be one of
the main attractions at next year's Adelaide Festival Writer's
Week. But she's withdrawn from the festival after her friend Peter
Sellars was ousted as director of the event.
The Age (Melbourne) 11/25/01
Friday November 23
PLEDGE
DRIVE PUBLISHING? "Non-profit book publishing has long
been largely dependent on foundation money. But as grants dry
up and sales become increasingly unreliable as a source of revenue,
many literary non-profits are turning to an area they once ignored:
The individual contributor. The result, experts say, is a model
that every day looks less like that of, say, an art gallery and
more like the democratically funded approach of public television."
Publishers Weekly 11/19/01
Thursday November
22
ALL
ABOUT ME: In an increasingly globalised world, where chain
stores and franchises replicate and spread with only scant reference
to pre-existing culture, where is the value in going anywhere?"
So travel writing has increasingly become more about the traveler
than the place. "This sense of the travel writer inserting
his or her personal frame of reference into the narrative is so
commonplace these days that it seems obvious."
The Age (Melbourne) 11/22/01
WHAT
STUTTGART ASPIRES TO BE: "Until now, Stuttgart, the urban
center of Swabian diligence and pietistic inwardness, has been
better known as a stronghold of the visual arts and theater."
But the city has just opened a new writers' center called Literaturhaus,
and meant to be "a meeting ground for modern culture."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
11/22/01
Wednesday November
21
BOOK
SALES DOWN: "With terrorism, war and the threat of recession
dominating consumers' attention this autumn, the major publishers
are having decreases in their sales of as much as 15 percent from
the lackluster levels of last year, according to executives at
several big publishers and distributors. . Publishers say that
sales of the best-selling novels, even by blockbuster authors,
are off by 25 percent to 40 from last year."
International Herald Tribune
(NYT) 11/21/01
Tuesday November
20
BE-LITTLED:
Why did Lingua Franca Magazine fold, despite its glowing reputation?
Because it's a little magazine. "The problem with little
magazines is that they're little. Their limited subject matter
consigns them to audiences so small no one can make money off
them. Big magazines make their money on advertising, but advertisers
aren't interested in little-magazine-size audiences."
The New York Times 11/20/01
(one-time registration required for access)
A
POEM IS LIKE... Why study poetry? Billy Collins suggests that
"to study poetry was to replicate the way we learn and think.
When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It
requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to
accommodate another point of view - which is a model of the kind
of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal
education seeks to encourage." Chronicle
of Higher Education 11/19/01
Monday November 19
SUBSIDIZING
THE WRITING LIFE: The sad fact is that even good writers with
reputations can't make a living from their art these days. They
have to subsidize their writing with other jobs. "Forget
about the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities. What
underwrites culture in America are libraries, newspapers, schools,
foundations, magazines, flop films and, yes, tips in restaurants.
And let's not forget spouses. If an author isn't making a living,
the wife or husband often is." Dallas
Morning News 11/19/01
NO-STYLE
SCHOOL: Why do so many writers on today's bestseller lists
have no style? In great literature - that is, the swirling, surprising
and sometimes unsettling prose that saves souls and redefines
reality - plot, detail, language, characters, point of view, truth,
beauty and other intangibles all clamor to be at the top."
The no-style school of writing goes "for a rhythmless beat,
and a straightforward approach to writing that ranks zippy, superinventive
plot first, stating the obvious second, concrete details third,
and language, artistry, character development and the exploration
of universal truths somewhere near the bottom of the list."
Washington Post 11/19/01
Sunday November 18
TOLKIEN
RAKES IT IN: A collection of archival material from JR Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings trilogy fetched nearly £59,000
at auction in London this week. The buyer remained anonymous,
and phoned in his bids to Christie's, eventually paying more than
half again as much as experts had expected the archive to go for.
BBC 11/16/01
WHAT
HO, WODEHOUSE? P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the wildly popular
"Jeeves" stories, and a national hero of humor in the
U.K., has been dead for more than a quarter of a century now,
but still, clouds of controversy continue to swirl around the
details of his life. The most disturbing allegations, which dogged
the writer for his last thirty years, had Wodehouse betraying
his country and siding with Hitler during World War II. In truth,
writes his biographer, Wodehouse's relationship with the Third
Reich was much more complex. The Observer
(UK) 11/18/01
Friday November 16
SHORT LIST FOR THE WHITBREAD:
The Booker sometimes gets more attention, but the Whitbread is
worth twice as much in cash. The shortlist for the Whitbread novel
award includes Ian McEwan, Andrew Miller, Helen Dunmore, and DJ
Patrick Neate. McEwan appears to be the favorite, but then he
also was the favorite for the Booker, which went to Peter Carey. The Guardian (UK) 11/14/01
MODESTY
IN GREAT ONES: "Chekhov's modesty, both in his youth and when he was a mature
writer, draws his reader toward him, as if it produced a kind
of unspoken bond between them. Thomas Mann, a writer by no means
remarkable for this virtue, observed that true modesty was the
rarest gift a great writer could have, and that Chekhov not only
possessed it but, like Shakespeare, gave no indication that he
was even aware of the fact." New York Review of Books 11/29/01
BIG
AND SMALL: Is this year's crop of Canadian books "small"
because they concentrate on small-town themes? "Regionalism
is dead. The notion that the particular may be made to stand for
the universal in art is passé. William Carlos Williams's belief
that 'localism alone can lead to culture' doesn't apply in the
age of the global village." GoodReports
11/16/01
TOLKIEN
TREASURES ON THE BLOCK: "A rare collection of proof copies,
first editions and letters by The Lord of the Rings author JRR
Tolkien is to be sold in London on Friday. The archive, which
chronicles the development of Tolkien's best-selling creation,
is expected to fetch around £35,000 at Christie's."
BBC 11/16/01
Thursday November
15
FRANZEN
WINS NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections,
the most talked-about book of the season, has won the National
Book Award. The
New York Times 11/15/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
SILENT
WINNING: When he won the Giller Prize last week, Richard
Wright was careful in commenting about his chances for
the Governor General's Literary Award. He had to be; he
already knew he had won both prizes, but couldn't say
anything until official announcement of the GG yesterday.
He had been nominated for both prizes in 1995, but won
neither. National
Post (CP) 11/15/01
-
Previously: AND
HE PROBABLY WON'T DISS OPRAH: Author Richard B.
Wright generally plays to a narrow audience. But this
week he's been Mr. Glamor - first taking home Canada's
top literary prize - the Giller. Now, the book is up
for a Governor General's Award, with the winner to be
announced Wednesday. It's a sweet moment for a retired
teacher who has written his nine novels in relative
obscurity." Vancouver
Sun (CP) 11/12/01
THERE'LL
BE SOME CHANGES MADE: Tom Carew's book Jihad! tells
of his exploits with an elite British military force, training
guerrillas in Afghanistan. It's a best seller in Britain. It's
also, the BBC reports, a fraud. Says Carew's publisher: "Obviously
we have to reconsider minor parts of Jihad! which require
changes in light of this investigation." The Guardian (UK) 11/15/01
Wednesday November
14
WRIGHT
SWEEPS CANADA'S TOP LIT AWARDS: Last week Richard B. White
won Canada's Giller Prize. Now he's won the Governor General
Award too. "Wright's winning novel, Clara Callan, tells
the story of two sisters who correspond with each other during
the 1930s from their respective homes in New York and the
fictional Ontario village of Whitfield." National
Post (CP) 11/14/01
-
Previously: AND
HE PROBABLY WON'T DISS OPRAH: Author Richard B. Wright
generally plays to a narrow audience. But this week he's
been Mr. Glamor - first taking home Canada's top literary
prize - the Giller. Now, the book is up for a Governor General's
Award, with the winner to be announced Wednesday. It's a
sweet moment for a retired teacher who has written his nine
novels in relative obscurity." Vancouver
Sun (CP) 11/12/01
BILLY'S
POETRY: Billy Collins, America's new poet laureate, is "the
antithesis of virtually every cultural cliche that Americans have
about poetry - that poets are pompous, that poetry is hard to
read and harder to understand, that poetry is no fun." He
says that much modern poetry isn't very good. How much? " 'Eighty-three
percent of American poetry is not worth reading,' he said playfully,
mocking the American emphasis, especially among journalists, on
statistics. 'I haven't done a study, but 83 percent seems like
the right number. I think 83 percent of movies aren't worth going
to, and 83 percent of restaurants aren't worth eating in'." Chicago
Tribune 11/14/01
Tuesday November
13
THE
BATTLIN' BIBLE: What's the biggest selling book in Manhattan
this week? Wrong if you answered Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections
(that's so last week's news). No, number one with a bullet
is Desecration: Antichrist takes the Throne, a Christian
book based on the Biblical book of Revelations. "The book,
written from a spiritually based outline penned by LaHaye, a minister,
follow the adventures of Rayford Steele and his Tribulation Force
as they battle to save the world from the evil warmonger Carpathia."
New York Post 11/13/01
AND
HE PROBABLY WON'T DISS OPRAH: Author Richard B. Wright generally
plays to a narrow audience. But this week he's been Mr. Glamor
- first taking home Canada's top literary prize - the Giller.
Now, the book is up for a Governor General's Award, with the winner
to be announced Wednesday. It's a sweet moment for a retired teacher
who has written his nine novels in relative obscurity."
Vancouver Sun (CP) 11/12/01
LADY CHATTERLEY'S
MULETEER: According to literary gossip, the model for Mellors
in the D H Lawrence novel was a lieutenant in the Italian Army.
Not true, says an Italian journalist; the real-life Mellors was
actually an Italian mule-driver, whom Lawrence's wife seduced
in the middle of a vineyard during a rainstorm. The
Guardian (UK) 11/12/01
Monday November 12
BOOKS,
BOOKS, EVERYWHERE... Last year 120,000 books were published
in the UK, and the number will probably grow again this year.
So there's no shortage of something to read. But what to read?
Since the canon of books everyone agreed was worth reading went
away, quantity has ruled over quality, and the news isn't necessarily
good. The
Observer (UK) 11/11/01
INSIDE
THE WRITER'S MONITOR: Since September 30, Pulitzer-winning
writer Robert Olen Butler has been writing a story, and the writing
sessions are broadcast over the internet as he works. "This
is not exactly must-see TV. Alone in his office at Florida State
University in Tallahassee, Mr. Butler types, revises and swivels
in his desk chair as he awaits inspiration, like any writer. But
there is a camera trained on his monitor, and it shows 'every
comma stroke, every lousy, rotten, awkward sentence, every blind
alley, every bad metaphor,' he said." The
New York Times 11/12/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
A
POSTMODERN POOH: Frederick Crews has written another parody
of literary critics, using Winnie the Pooh as his subject.
"Crews' targets - Deconstructionists, Poststructuralist Marxists,
New Historicists and others - are so egregiously fatuous and self-righteous
that Crews' parody is overshadowed by the quotations he lifts
from their actual books." Toronto
Star 11/11/01
TRUE
TO ART: Jonathan Franzen's snub of Oprah wasn't a spontaneous
slight. In an essay he wrote five years ago, he noted that: "no
matter how attractively subversive self-promotion may seem in
the short run, the artist who's really serious about resisting
a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image must resist becoming
an image himself even at the price of certain obscurity."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 11/11/01
Sunday November 11
SOMEWHERE
BETWEEN ART AND COMMERCE: It's easy to condemn Jonathan Franzen's
tactless swat at Oprah's Book Club. But the sentiment is not foreign
to serious writers - of course writers want audiences, and the
bigger the better. But that doesn't mean they necessarily want
to go whoring after them. Not that being an Oprah writer is whoring,
but maybe... Boston
Globe 11/10/01
Friday November 9
RANDOM
HOUSE DROPS E-BOOK LINE: "The Random House Trade Group,
one of the first publishers to announce the creation of a line
of purely digital books last year, became the first to cancel
that idea yesterday, quietly scuttling its AtRandom imprint in
recognition of the scant consumer demand for books that can be
read on screens. But the company will continue to publish electronic
versions of books." The New York Times 11/09/01
(one-time registration required for access)
MISSING
SHIELDS: Somehow no one involved with Canada's Governor General
Awards (due to be awarded next week) realized that Carol Shields'
book on Jane Austen was missing from consideration. "It should
have been on everybody's radar. This is Carol Shields."
The Globe & Mail (Canada)
11/08/01
POETS
CUT BACK: After ousting its popular executive director earlier
this week, the board of the Academy of American Poets has decided
"to lay off 8 of its 17 employees and to sublease half of
its office space in SoHo" in an effort to stave off a looming
financial crisis. The
New York Times 11/09/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
THERE'S
BONES IN THE OLD LIFE YET: Life magazine was a major
US publication, a highly-visible weekly from 1936 to 1978. It
continued, will less success and less attention, until last year.
Then it seemed to die. But now it's back, at the projected rate
of two issues every three months. First issue, not surprisingly,
focuses on September 11. Washington
Post 11/09/01
Thursday November
8
A
LOVE LETTER TO LINGUA FRANCA: "Lingua Franca had been
an absolutely invaluable and highly influential resource, searching
out the genuinely important controversies over ideas emerging
from the academic world. Searching through the vast torrents of
jargon-addled dross to find and convey the rare excitement of
real thinkers grappling with original ideas. And exposing the
sad comedy of pretentious sophists confecting academic simulacra
of real thinking." And now it's gone. New
York Observer 11/06/01
THE
ARTIST WITHIN: When he's not busy being a disctator, Saddam
Hussein is an artist. "Underneath a seemingly tyrannical
nature, there lives a passionate soul yearning to share his deepest,
most delicate and intimate thoughts. Saddam has written a romance
novel. Released earlier this year, Zabibah and the King
appears to have won the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and
made Saddam Hussein a best-selling novelist - according to the
Iraq Press it has been selling out of Iraqi bookstores and there
are already over 1,000,000 copies in print." The
Weekly Standard 11/08/01
GO
LITERARY, YOUNG MAN: A farmer who wanted to be a poet wrote
letters to the leading poets of his day, and they wrote back.
That was 160 years ago. Now, those letters to Abijah Metcalfe
- from Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell - will be auctioned
off. Longfellows are common; his reply may fetch only $1500. But
Poes are rare; his could bring $30,000. Nando
Times (AP) 11/07/01
DICKENS?
DOYLE? FLEMING? MILNE? NO, IT'S....Rowling who has created
England's most famous imaginary hero. In a nationwide survey,
asking people of all ages to name the first fictional character
who came to mind, 22 percent said Harry Potter. Tied for second
place, with 2 percent each, were Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist,
James Bond, and Winnie the Pooh. New
York Post 11/07/01
Wednesday November
7
WRIGHT
WINS GILLER PRIZE: "Author Richard B. Wright expressed
'genuine surprise' last night at winning the Giller Prize, Canada's
most lucrative award for fiction. Mr. Wright won for Clara
Callan, his ninth novel... This year's short list was particularly
notable for the number of first-time novelists that made the cut."
National Post (Canada) 11/07/01
HARDY
ON THE BLOCK: "A collection of Thomas Hardy's works and
letters - said to be the finest left in private hands - is going
under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Wednesday. The collection,
which is expected to fetch about £500,000, contains more than
260 autographed letters from Hardy - including descriptions of
the hostile reception to his novel Jude The Obscure." BBC
11/07/01
POET
CANNED: The American Academy of Poets has fired its popular
executive director. "William Wadsworth, 51, a poet and former
wine store owner, ran the 65-year-old organization for 12 years,
during which he updated its image, increased its profile, created
a popular Web site to encourage poetry reading and turned April
into poetry month." But the organization has racked up hundreds
of thousands of dollars of debt... The
New York Times 11/07/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
Tuesday November
6
GILLER
PRIZE UP FOR GRABS TONIGHT: It's been a tough year in the
world of Canadian publishing. But tonight, all the strife and
infighting will be forgotten for a few hours, as the literary
establishment gathers in Toronto for the presentation of the nation's
most prestigious book prize, the Giller. The secrecy around the
winner is legend, but Richard Wright and Jane Urquhart are believed
to be the frontrunners. Toronto Star
11/06/01
LINGUA
FRANCA ET MORT - WHY? What happened to cause the sudden demise
of Lingua Franca Magazine last week? "Indications were, in
fact, quite the opposite — Lingua Franca seemed to be the foundation
for a steadily growing mini–empire of publications related to
the academy and the world of letters." MobyLives
11/06/01
DOCTOR
WINS FRANCE'S TOP BOOK PRIZE: "France's top literary
award has gone to a former official of the humanitarian organisation
Medecins Sans Frontieres. Jean-Christophe Rufin won the award
for his "ecological novel" Rouge Bresil (Red Brazil)... Each year's
winner is selected by the Goncourt jury at the Drouant restaurant,
near the Opera in Paris. The jury chooses what it believes to
be the best new work of literature - making its author into an
instant celebrity in France." BBC
11/06/01
MORE
FRANZEN FALLOUT: What does the Oprah Winfrey/Jonathan Franzen
flap say about today's literary world? "Franzen has to grapple
with a serious paradox here, which lies in being so blatantly
image-conscious, even while he criticizes the image-makers. His
concern is not about what he writes, and whether it connects with
readers, but how he is perceived, and what kind of readers he
connects with. This is the very kind of attention to branding
that he claims to deplore." National
Post 11/06/01
HARRY
POTTER, OCCULT SEDUCER? One of Britain's biggest teaching
unions has issued a stern warning to parents and teachers that
J.K. Rowling's phenomenally successful creation could lead schoolchildren
into the sinister world of the occult. The
Guardian (UK) 11/06/01
Monday November 5
THE
LAST WORD ON OPRAH: Critic Jonathan Yardley's no Oprah fan,
but he's respectful of what her book club can do for a writer.
"If I were forced to choose - perish the thought - between
reading a year's worth of Oprah selections or the top dozen books
on the fiction bestseller list, I'd make a beeline for Oprah.
The literary taste of the American mass market is execrable. Oprah
Winfrey is doing her part to elevate it. If in the process she's
elevating herself as well - this is, after all, the woman who
publishes a magazine named after herself with her own picture
always prominent on the cover - so what?" Washington
Post 11/05/01
CAN'T
YOU DO BETTER THAN SHALLOW ADS? The Canadian province of Newfoundland
is spending $400,000 on ads promoting literacy. But the province's
literary community is protesting: "I think for a tenth of the
cost of that budget, the local publishers and the local writing
community could do a lot to promote children's books and involve
adults in delivering the stories." CBC
11/04/01
Sunday November 4
HANDICAPPING
THE GILLER: "Now, in its eighth year, the Giller Prize
[Canada's top literary prize] finds itself at a turning point.
The year is not a stellar one for CanLit - it is without a banner
novel - and the jurors face an aggrandized task. They will have
to atone for last year's jury's timorous compromise - no splitting
of the prize, please - and it will be tough to make a splash in
what is otherwise a decidedly gloomy season. Also, they will be
deciding, in the public eye (whether they like it or not), if
the Giller evolves into an Academy of Letters or, true to precedent,
simply opts for best book." National
Post (Canada) 11/03/01
IF
IT'S NOT REALLY HARRY... Last spring author NK Stouffer sued
JK Rowling, claiming Rowling ripped off elements of Harry Potter
from Stouffer. But though Stouffer got her book published , it's
being ignored. "One review was by The Associated Press, which
called it an 'excruciating mix of cliche, preachiness and just
poor writing.' Meanwhile, the country's leading superstore chains,
Borders and Barnes & Noble, declined to stock Stouffer's work.
Baltimore Sun (AP) 11/03/01
LESSONS
FROM OPRAH: "Unlike their dowdy British counterparts,
fashionable new American writers like Jonathan Franzen are assured
of sales in the hundreds of thousands (with corresponding remuneration).
This money becomes a passport to a kind of celebrity that is,
for a while at least, self-sustaining, and leads to the kind of
stance that Mr Franzen is now adopting towards Oprah Winfrey,
with the almost comical implication that it's she who is hitching
a ride on his waggon. Worse still, in the long term, it does not
generally lead to great writing." The
Observer (UK) 11/04/01
Friday November 2
DEFENDING
OPRAH AND HER CRITIC: "Many people think Oprah is a saint
for her bookselling, so any questioning of her is Bad-Wrong-Dumb.
Sorry, the problem here is that in the often dim, anti-intellectual
caves of network TV, she's the only person talking about serious
lit. Her tastes aren't mine, but I actually wish she had more
influence – on other producers. We might get some wider-ranging
book coverage. Choices. Rivalries."
Dallas Morning News 11/01/01
LEAVING
THE PENGUIN NEST: Penguin Putnam has lost its chief executive and several
key editors; now it may also be about to lose top authors Tom
Clancy and Patricia Cornwell. The key defection is that of longtime
chief executive Phyllis Grann, who's leaving the end of this year
after continued criticism of Pearson, parent company of the book
publisher. The
New York Times 11/01/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
Thursday November
1
POWER
TO THE PEOPLE: Maybe it was no surprise that Jonathan Franzen
put down Oprah and her book club. "What was telling about
the Franzen-Winfrey contretemps was the five-alarm outrage of
Manhattan’s literary publishing community. Faced with a choice—reprimanding
arguably their brightest star in years or alienating a woman who
spends many of her shows in the company of a bald-pated schmaltzateer
named Dr. Phil—judgment was swift. New York publishing chose Oprah."
New York Observer 10/31/01
A
LITTLE LIGHT READING: "A children's book about life under
Afghanistan's Taleban regime has been published. The novel, by
Canadian author Deborah Ellis, tells the story of Parvana, an
11-year-old Afghan girl, and her struggles to avoid beatings,
bombings and starvation. Oxford University Press, the book's publishers,
said that the book was written before the current conflict began
and was intended for publication later this year or early in 2002."
BBC 11/01/01
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