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

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