Category: words

Sunday June 30

SATIRIST OR ANTI-SEMITE? German academic and novelist Martin Walser’s latest book has been decried by a major newspaper as a thinly veiled collection of vicious anti-Semitism. The plot is ostensibly about a writer who kills a critic, but Walser’s detractors claim that he is “not interested in the murder of a critic in his capacity as a critic. This is about the murder of a Jew.” Naturally, the book sold out on its first day in stores. BBC 06/28/02

CLOSED BORDERS: A collection of leftist intellectuals is taking on the giant Borders bookstore chain over a little-known company policy known as ‘category management,’ which looks an awful lot like ‘dumbing down the product’ to book lovers. Borders claims that their market research supports the policy, but opponents insist that “there is a difference between books and Pop-Tarts,” and that they should not be marketed in similar fashion. The Plain Dealer (AP) 06/29/02

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: “Textbook battles are legendary in Texas, where conservative critics frequently complain of liberal bias, and liberals counter with charges of censorship. The latest round, on July 17, when the board begins public hearings on which history and social studies books to adopt, promises to be particularly fierce. Nine conservative organizations have formed a coalition, recruiting 250 volunteers to vet more than 150 books.” The New York Times 06/29/02

THE CURSE OF THE REWRITE: For those who create stories for a living, the prospect of spending days, weeks, or even months on a character or plotline that just doesn’t end up going anywhere is constantly in the back of the mind. So how do the bestselling authors know when they’ve taken a wrong turn, and what do they do about it? The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 06/29/02

Thursday June 27

POWER STRUGGLE AT NWU: The National Writers’ Union is meeting in delegate assembly this week in New Hampshire, and the internal strife is worthy of a Teamsters gathering. At issue is the presidency of Jonathan Tasini, who has been celebrated for winning the right of freelance writers to be paid for online publication of their work, but excoriated for stifling debate within the union and being unresponsive to the needs of the membership. Boston Globe 06/27/02

UK’S JOHNSON PRIZE TO A CANADIAN: “A Toronto university professor, Margaret MacMillan, has won the United Kingdom’s most valuable non-fiction literary prize, for a ‘splendidly revisionist’ account of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Dr. MacMillan, who teaches at both the University of Toronto and Ryerson University and is about to become Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, won the prestigious CDN$68,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, for her book, Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919.” National Post (Canada) 06/27/02

AMAZON IN CANADA: After talking about it for months Amazon finally announces its new Canadian store. “Amazon said the bilingual site will have prices in Canadian dollars, will take orders through Canada Post, and will post some reviews in both French and English. Amazon.ca will also give prominence to Canadian artists on the site while giving shoppers access to 1.5 million books, music, videos and DVDs available through the original Amazon.com Web site.” Canadian booksellers have been protesting the plan, saying it will hurt Canadian book stores. Toronto Star 06/26/02

CLEAN SLATE: The original online magazine has a new editor, and Jacob Weisberg is promising that Slate will reinvigorate its cultural coverage, become more things to more readers, and maybe even turn a profit, all in the next year or so. Chicago Tribune 06/27/02

Tuesday June 25

BEST WHAT? As a measure of success, bestseller lists are also powerful marketing tools. To be a bestseller is to guarantee that thousands more potential customers will read your book. But. What exactly is a bestseller? “That may seem like an easy enough question to answer – it’s the book that sold the most copies in the past week, a matter of simple, quantitative fact. In reality, though, the actual process of calculating a bestseller list from week to week often involves as much interpretation on the part of list-compilers as it does actual sales figures. And many observers despise the lists, claiming that they spotlight books for dubious or purely commercial reasons.” Salon 06/25/02

Monday June 24

A GOOD YEAR FOR LIBRARIANS: Almost 21,000 American librarians gathered in Atlanta last week for the American Library Association Annual Conference. The mood was congratulatory. In recent months librarians successfully lobbied to remove requiredments they use software filters on library computers. And Michael Moore was there to thank librarians for lobbying his publisher to release his current book. Publishers Weekly 06/24/02

READING – JUST AN ILLUSION? “Are Americans reading more, or do they just want you to think they are? Sales have been flat in recent years, but praise of books both good and great is on the rise. Since TV host Oprah Winfrey announced she was cutting back on her picks, at least four new clubs have been formed, with literary novels such as Empire Falls among the beneficiaries.” Milwuakee Journal-Sentinel (AP) 06/23/02

Sunday June 23

DIALOGUE REOPENED: A midwest arts magazine which ceased publication in April has been revived by a buyer from Columbus, Ohio. Dialogue, which has been publishing for nearly a quarter-century, plans to expand its focus and its distribution area, and the new owner insists that it will make money as well. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/22/02

Friday June 21

BUSH APPEALS LIBRARY FILTERING: The Bush administration is appealing last month’s federal court ruling striking down a requirement that public libraries install filtering software on their computers to block pornography. The court had ruled that filtering software wasn’t able to block porn without also filtering other sites. Wired 06/20/02

• INS AND OUTS OF BLOCKING: How are libraries dealing with pornography over the internet? In a variety of ways. “Each library system says its approach is meeting its needs — and that, librarians say, is the most important lesson of the pornography wars. ‘Because libraries are so deeply rooted in their communities, librarians have the best read on their communities and how to approach the issues around Internet access’.” The New York Times 06/20/02

WEIGHTY MATTERS: Why do successful American books seem to be getting fatter? “Recently, there seems to have been a correlation between enormous novels and enormous advances. Over the past five years, the American literary scene has been littered with big, fat books marking their author’s claim on the Great (Big) American Novel: David Foster Wallace’s truly infinite Infinite Jest, at 1088 pages; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, 832 pages; and Thomas Pynchon’s most recent, Mason and Dixon, 784 pages.” The Age (Melbourne) 06/21/02

Thursday June 20

NOT SHAKESPEARE: Writing that “no one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar,” a prominent Vassar “literary sleuth” has determined that a poem written in 1612 that he had attributed to Shakespeare with great publicity seven years ago is not by the Bard. He says that “the Elegy he claimed for Shakespeare was actually more likely written by John Ford, a Jacobean dramatist.” New York Observer 06/19/02

THE STORY OF MY (EXAGGERATED) LIFE: So many recent memoirs seem to contain exaggerated (or fabricated) stories. Is it that real life isn’t interesting enough? Or is it that as fiction it wouldn’t ring true? “What gives in the world of nonfiction these days? Why is it leaning so close to — maybe even into — the world of fiction? And why don’t they just call it fiction?” MobyLives 06/19/02

Wednesday June 19

DEFENDING MUGGLES: Author JK Rowling has sold 67 million of her Harry Potter books. But she’s in court defending charges by a Pennsylvania writer who claims Rowling stole key parts of her work for the Potter series. “I am deeply offended that my integrity and good character have been besmirched by the ludicrous allegations that I stole any part of the books.” The Age (Bloomberg) 06/19/02

ACADEMIA ATTACKS STUPIDITY: Why are we stupid? A new book compiles some ideas. “Robert Sternberg’s premise is that stupidity and intelligence aren’t like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa.” Salon 06/19/02

Tuesday June 18

SHARE DARE: Librarians have an inclination to share. And electronic versions of books are an efficient way to share with the world. That’s exactly what publishers are worried about. “Librarians have seized on the potential of digital technology and offered users free online access to the contents of books from their homes, and they are squaring off with publishers who fear that free remote access costs them book sales.” The New York Times 06/17/02

SO WHO NEEDS OPRAH? Several TV book groups have started since the daytime diva decided to pack in her show’s book club earlier this year. Some of them are rivaling Oprah’s affect on sales. For example, Ann Packer’s novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, has become an instant best seller after being chosen by Good Morning America. Washington Post (AP) 06/14/02

Monday June 17

LOOKING FOR SUPPORT: So you’ve landed that publishing contract. Got it made? “While the main advantage to being published by a big press is the distribution, marketing, promotion, and visibility it can offer, all too often that kind of attention is only bestowed upon the clearly commercial novel that is already earmarked to be a winner, usually because of the author’s previous performance. Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer for all 582 Barnes & Noble superstores, says the sad truth is that only 10 percent of books get any serious marketing or PR support.” Poets & Writers 06/02

BOOK-AS-OBJECT: “Collecting books to read, or at least to refer to, makes every kind of sense. However, most serious book collectors do the opposite. They buy books they never intend to read, books they can’t afford to read because it would damage their value to do so.” London Evening Standard 06/17/02

KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT? Never fails – every year there are a couple of prominent accusations of plagiarism. But there’s a problem – “there is no single, universally accepted definition and, consequently, no effective punishment. We don’t develop a fund of experience or build up much history on this topic. Cases like [those of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin] come out once or twice every year, and always the same fundamental questions are asked. What is plagiarism? We don’t make much cultural progress on the issue. As with pornography, people think they know plagiarism when they see it. However, the definition of plagiarism changes depending on the writer’s role and motivation.” Poets & Writers 06/02

RANDOM NUMBERS: Random House has posted a $14 million loss for the second half of last year, its first loss in four years. “All major publishers felt a decline in demand for books because of the recession and the terrorist attacks, but none of the other major publishers that publicly report results suffered as much. Revenue for the last six months of the year fell slightly at Penguin Putnam, held steady at HarperCollins and rose to $377 million from $350 million at Simon & Schuster. None reported losses.” The New York Times 06/17/02

Thursday June 13

FICTIONABLE: The Australian fiction market is a respectable size, but “sales figures for fiction are down and fewer first novelists are being published. In 1999-2000 Australians bought 1.1 million new hardback novels worth $17.8 million, 1.2 million trade paperback novels for $13.9 million, and also spent $42.6 million on 8.5 million mass-market novels. In that period, 36 new hardback, 155 new trade paperback, and 1089 new mass-market novels were published. The Age (Melbourne) 06/13/02

Wednesday June 12

PATCHETT WINS ORANGE: American author Ann Patchett has won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Bel Canto, The award is given to the best novel written by a woman, and is worth £30,000, one of the largest literary prizes around. “Bel Canto tells the tale of a group of Latin terrorists who storm an international gathering promoting foreign trade, only to find the president, their intended target, has stayed at home to watch his favourite soap opera.” BBC 06/12/02

WHO BUYS BOOKS: In Australia “the $126-million book industry relies on women for the bulk of its sales. Women not only buy for themselves but for men and children. And it is 35 to 50-year-olds who buy the most. “The closer they get to 50, the more books they buy,” Drum says. A national survey of reading, book buying and borrowing, completed last year for the Australia Council, found that women browsed more in bookshops, read more widely, and were happier relaxing with a book than men were.” The Age (Melbourne) 06/12/02

CAL’S NEW POET LAUREATE: Earlier this year California had trouble attracting enough candidates for the job of the state’s first poet laureate. This week, Quincy T. Troupe, a University of San Diego professor got the job. At the announcement of his appointment in the state capital, Troupe read “a pair of poems, one inspired by California’s coastline, the other by Michael Jordan.” California is the 24th state to have a poet laureate. Sacramento Bee 06/12/02

REJECTION AS A REVENUE STREAM: Tired of those form rejection letters for your Great American Novel? Stymied by your efforts to get your book in front of an editor? A new venture offers tips on how to get your book publishable. But the real lure is that a real live editor from Penguin Putnam will read and critique your effort. It only costs $119. “The plan makes a certain kind of sense: After all, there’s a whole cottage industry of writers conferences, magazines and guides preaching the gospel to aspiring authors. But a publishing company is closest to the ultimate prize, actual acceptance. It could charge writers extra for a bona fide book editor to explain to the aspiring writer why she wasn’t buying his manuscript. Rejection as a revenue stream!” Salon 06/12/02

Tuesday June 11

IS THE BOOK REAL? Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls has had much play, climbing the bestseller lists and “helping ignite a national debate about ‘mean girls’.” But to one columnist, the quotes seemed not quite right, a little too sophisticated to be real. Contacting the author, she arranged to sample some of the interview tapes to check them. But when the time came, Simmons changed her mind and declined to reveal the tapes. “It must be said that Simmons and her publisher are well within their legal rights to refuse my request.” But “when readers raise legitimate questions about a work’s accuracy, the authors owe it to themselves, their subjects, their works and the world of letters to verify their claims.” The News & Observer (Raleigh) 06/10/02

CALIFORNIA GRAPES: California has chosen John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for its state reading club, asking everyone in the state to read the book. “Libraries, town halls, schools, universities, bookstores and theaters are planning Steinbeck-themed parties, readings, shows and lectures. And Hollywood, of course, is writing its own script, dispatching celebrities to add glitz to its read-along gatherings.” San Francisco Chronicle 06/10/02

HEY HAY HEH: “Stratford has Shakespeare, Glyndebourne has opera, Hay-on-Wye has books – and its very own literary festival. Perched at the foot of the Black Mountains, the tiny market town of Hay boasts 39 bookshops, two million books and a population of just 1,200. And for ten days each year, the town hosts its very own ‘Woodstock of the mind’, as Bill Clinton dubbed it last year. It regularly attracts some 50,000 book-lovers from across the UK, Europe and the US. Well, that at least is the official blurb.” But has Hay, with its squabbles and feuds and outsized operations, become too big for itself? New Statesman 06/10/02

Monday June 10

BEMUSEMENT AT BOOKER BRUHAHA: American critics continue to be amused at British angst over opening up the Booker Prize to American writers. Would the Americans dominate the competition? “Given the last two decades of ambitious experimentation by British writers, why do intimations of literary inferiority persist? In part, it’s a reflection of the European view of the United States as a bullying superpower, acting unilaterally, be it in the political and military sphere or in the world of cultural commerce. In part, it has to do with what the British critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury once called ‘trans-Atlantic mythologies’ — deep-seated attitudes that writers on either side of the ocean have long held about one another.” The New York Times 06/10/02

DREAMING WHAT YOU READ: A new study says what you read is linked to what you dream. Researchers found that “adults choosing fiction had stranger dreams – but were more likely to remember them. While fantasy novel fans had more nightmares and ‘lucid’ dreams, in which they are aware they are dreaming. The dreams of those who preferred romantic novels were more emotionally intense.” BBC 06/10/02

THE FICKLE READING PUBLIC: Last year it was reported that Saddam Hussein’s first novel was an Iraqi bestseller. But “Saddam’s most recent novel – The Impregnable Fortress, a moving tale of love and war – has been selling poorly. This despite the fact that Iraq printed 2 million copies of the novel, issued purchasing quotas for each Iraqi province, and declared the work the best-selling novel in Iraqi history even before it was released. Saddam’s son Udai certainly did his filial literary duty to boost sales; he ordered 250,000 copies.” Reason 07/02

REFUGE FOR POETS: New York’s Poets House is 15 years old. “One purpose is to give poets a place to explore the work of other poets. It’s largely from other poets that one begins to be a poet. You’re not going to become one through learning prosody, but through the energizing force of the word. I think every poet begins by simply being enchanted by the sound of words. Like other poets, I remember walking — running rather — through the woods, shouting new words that I had learned.” The New York Times 06/10/02

HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLER: More than a few people get it into their heads that they can make a fortune writing a bestseller. How hard can it be? “Of course it can’t be done. You might as well stand in a field during a thunderstorm and hope to be struck by lightning. Bestsellers defy analysis. But if you did want to prospect for this fool’s gold, here are four guidelines.” The Observer (UK) 06/09/02

PAUL GOTTLIEB, 67: “In his 20 years as publisher and editor in chief of the country’s most notable publisher of art books he exercised vast influence, not merely on how such books are published but also on how art is presented and promoted at museums around the world. Gottlieb knew just about everybody connected in one way or another to publishing and art.” Washington Post 06/10/02

Sunday June 9

READING INTO FESTIVALS: Nothing new about literary festivals, of course. But they’re getting bigger and more popular. “If the literary festival, whether played out in a windblown north-of-the-border square, in the foothills of the Black Mountains or on the Suffolk coast, represents the public face of contemporary letters, then it also doubles up as the chief agency for establishing its hierarchies and pecking orders. Far more so than best-seller charts, the literary festival is an infallible guide to who’s who and what’s what in the world of books, and who cuts it with the punters.” The Guardian (UK) 06/08/02

Friday June 7

ABOUT IDEAS, RIGHT? Sometimes literary festivals mutate into something other than events about books. “This year the 16th Hay Festival seems less a wholesale celebration of literature than a salute to almost every intellectual and practical pastime known to human life – archaeology, biotechnology, cookery, horseracing, art and much else too.” The Independent (UK) 06/05/02

JUST STORIES? “The past two decades have seen a veritable explosion in biographical studies of philosophers. Since 1982, more than 30 biographies of philosophers have appeared. Of those, 20 have been published in the past decade, a dozen just since 1999. And more are in the works. Some see the trend as principally a reflection of currents in the publishing world, while others say it is a direct result of conceptual shifts in philosophy and in intellectual life more generally. But as the books keep coming, skeptics remain unpersuaded that this biographical ‘turn’ is of any philosophical importance.” Chronicle of Higher Education 06/07/02

WEB FREE POETRY: Poetry in print is a problem – it’s expensive to publish and it has a limited audience. But “on the web, distribution is no problem: it’s all available 24/7, and everyone is equal, at least theoretically. There is the perfect book-buying system in Amazon, there are online poetry magazines and newsgroups. The publishers have websites so you can see what’s available (bookshop poetry sections can be very patchy).Perfect in theory. How does it measure up? Google produces 7.25m pages for “poetry.” The Guardian (UK) 06/06/02

Thursday June 6

OBJECTING TO A CANADIAN AMAZON: The Canadian Booksellers Association is fighting Amazon’s entry into Canada. Canadian law requires that booksellers be majority-owned by Canadians. Amazon figures to get around the rule by forming a partnership with a Canadian crown corporation. The booksellers mainatin that “a review of Amazon.com’s investment in the Canadian distribution and sale of books business would reveal, first, that the new entity would in fact be controlled by foreign interests and, second, that the investment would not likely be of net benefit to Canada.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/05/02

Wednesday June 5

IS IT WHO YOU KNOW? Yale professor Stephen Carter got $4.2 million for his first novel. But “why would a publisher pay $4.2 million to a first novelist manifestly without skills and apparently without gifts?” Newsweek 06/10/02

INSURING PROBLEMS: Add to the woes of independent booksellers the growing cost of insurance. Insurance premiums have risen sharply this year, and some independents fear this may put them out of business. Publishers Weekly 06/04/02

ONE OF THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC SPACES: “All cities have libraries, but only New York has one with a reading room two blocks long, where murals of blue skies and puffy clouds float overhead, and tall arched windows look out to Fifth Avenue on one side and Bryant Park on the other. The Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library is the center of the city’s intellectual life and one of the great democratic spaces anywhere.” Dallas Morning News 06/05/02

Tuesday June 4

BEACH BLANKET BOOKS: It’s beach-book season again. “Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking on the part of your faithful book snob, but it does seem as if there are some books of quality more visible in the mix this year. Perhaps it’s a follow–up to some trends observed last fall, when readers in the new, post–9/11 world passed up lighter fare in favor of books about spirituality and politics, etc. Perhaps it’s just the mini–rebellions made inevitable by the creeping crud of conglomerization taking over all aspects of the business. But whatever the reason, in this year’s installment of Memorial Day book chatter, newspapers (outside of New York, at least) seemed to talk about some better literature than usual.” MobyLives 06/03/02

Monday June 3

SYDNEY’S NEW LITERARY STAR: “The Sydney Writers’ Festival, has, perhaps, finally found a legitimate niche in the city’s increasingly crowded cultural calendar, with audiences this year expected to reach an all-time high of well over 40,000. With an increasingly high profile courtesy of a clever programing mix, the obligatory star guest names, healthy media attention and an even healthier book-buying local market, there is talk that the event may even be outgrowing its relatively new docklands home.” Sydney Morning Herald 06/03/02

RAISING THE POETRY PROFILE: Canada’s Griffin Prize for poetry pays the winner $40,000. But that’s only a small part of the award. “More evidence of the success of the prize is the case of Christian Bök, declared the Canadian winner at a gala dinner Thursday. Bök’s second poetry collection Eunoia (published by Coach House Books) has sold an unheard of 7,000 copies. ‘We’ve reprinted it eight times. Most poetry books sell no more than 1,000, ever’.” Toronto Star 06/02/02

SCANDAL INSECURITIES: Predictably, a wave of books about the Catholic church’s pedophile scandal is making its way into American bookstores. “But as they begin shipping the first new books to stores this week, publishers are proceeding with trepidation, worried that a story of bungling bishops and pedophilic priests, may, in fact, repel the core Catholic audience.” The New York Times 06/03/02

BRING ON THE YANKS: The British literary world’s upset about Americans being included in the Booker Prize is a joke. “Does anyone over there really believe that American lit’ry fiction in this Year of Our Lord 2002 is so superior to that of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth that it would swamp the Booker competition? What have these people been reading, or smoking? What a joke! The plain fact is that in recent years serious or ‘literary’ fiction from Britain and the Commonwealth has broadened and deepened, in scope and quality alike, even as comparable fiction from the United States has shriveled into what is rapidly becoming self-parody.” Washington Post 06/03/02

Sunday June 2

IN PRAISE OF PAPER: Paperbacks used to be the publishing industry’s “B” team. But “sales of paperbacks have outpaced those of hardcovers over the past several years, growing steadily even when hardback purchases have dipped. Anchor and Vintage, the two paperback-only imprints of Random House, have seen their sales volume increase more than 500 percent since the early 1990s. The surge has been driven partly by the boom in ‘superstores’ – chains like Border’s or Barnes & Noble – but but also by big independent outlets.” The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 06/02/02

Friday May 31

WALSER CONDEMNED/DEFENDED: Critics are condemning Martin Walser’s new book as anti-semitic. “The book is about a wounded author’s supposed murder of a high-profile Jewish book reviewer, obviously modeled on the prominent critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki.” Walser’s publisher has “rejected the suggestion that it is an obvious roman à clef,” saying that “comparing literature to reality has nothing to do with literary criticism, only with malice.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/30/02

• WALSER DEFENDS: “I would never, never, never have thought that this book would now be set in the context of the Holocaust. Believe me, I would never have written it in that case.” The Guardian (UK) 05/30/02
• Previously: CHARACTER ASSASSINATION: Prominent German writer Martin Walser proposed to editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the newspaper serialize his new novel. Instead, one of the paper’s editors writes an extraordinary open letter to Walser declining the offer, and accusing the writer of vicious anti-semitism. “It is important to you, you said, that it appear in this particular newspaper. I must inform you that your novel will not appear in this newspaper. May the critics decide how good or bad this book is in terms of lasting value. ‘Even a bad Walser is an event,’ a well-known editor once said. Your novel is an execution, in which you settle the score with – and let us drop the smoke screen of fictitious names from the start – Marcel Reich-Ranicki. It is about the murder of a prominent critic.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/28/02

JUMPING ON JONATHAN: Jonathan Foer’s debut book has become a literary sensation. But is the hype all because of his age (25) and the astounding advance ($400,000) he got? “A backlash was inevitable: the bookselling website Amazon is full of vicious comments saying Foer’s success owed little to talent and much to his youth and excellent connections (his brother is an editor for the New Republic magazine, his creative writing teachers were literary luminaries Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks, both of whom provided fulsome quotes for the blurb). The publishing industry was accused of over-hyping Foer, at the expense of others.” The Telegraph (UK) 05/31/02

Thursday May 30

CANADIANS PROTEST AMAZON PLANS: “The book industry is abuzz with rumours that Amazon will set up a Canadian subsidiary this year in partnership with a Canadian firm. Government rules say booksellers must be Canadian-controlled, forcing anyone interested in the market to find a Canadian partner. The Canadian Booksellers Association says that cannot be allowed to happen.” National Post (Canada) 05/28/02

BRINGING JOYCE BACK TO IRELAND: Ireland’s National Library has bought a collection of 500 papers by novelist James Joyce. “The rare collection, believed to be the largest of its kind – includes unseen drafts of the classic book Ulysses.” BBC 05/30/02

Wednesday May 29

CHARACTER ASSASSINATION: Prominent German writer Martin Walser proposed to editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the newspaper serialize his new novel. Instead, one of the paper’s editors writes an extraordinary open letter to Walser declining the offer, and accusing the writer of vicious anti-semitism. “It is important to you, you said, that it appear in this particular newspaper. I must inform you that your novel will not appear in this newspaper. May the critics decide how good or bad this book is in terms of lasting value. ‘Even a bad Walser is an event,’ a well-known editor once said. Your novel is an execution, in which you settle the score with – and let us drop the smoke screen of fictitious names from the start – Marcel Reich-Ranicki. It is about the murder of a prominent critic.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05/28/02

Tuesday May 28

A FEW NEW STATISTICS ON READING: A new Scottish study reports that people spend an average of only 11 minutes a day reading novels. “Fiction has now been overtaken by newspapers as the most popular reading material, research by the Orange Prize for Fiction has claimed. It also said 40 per cent of the population do not read books at all. Researchers said that people spend only six hours a week reading, compared with three hours a day watching television.” The Scotsman 05/27/02

SEPARATION ANXIETY: “There comes a point in the writing process when a novel turns a corner, after which it is no longer a work of fiction. The events are as real as anything the author has seen on TV or read about in a newspaper, and the characters have as solid an existence as anyone outside his immediate circle of family and friends.” This makes it hard when you finally have to pak up your new friends and send them off to a publisher. “No author is immune to the empty-nest syndrome, the aching, psychic void as he fidgets from room to room like a reformed smoker, staring at his trembling hands, full of fresh air, fingers bitten to the quick.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/28/02

INFERIORITY COMPLEX? British writers have been protesting the decision to open up the Booker Prize to include American writers. Writers from the Commonwealth need something of their own, they say, and the Americans would dominate the competition. But such arguments “tell us more about a certain British cultural inferiority complex than about the nation’s literature. The notion that American writers exist in another league is fatuous, cringing. The protestation of British inadequacy, said Robert McCrum, literary editor of the newspaper the Observer, is ‘quasi-philistine, provincial and rather embarrassing’.” San Francisco Chronicle 05/28/02

Monday May 27

TO CATCH A THIEF: William Simon Jacques is one of the great book thieves in history. Since 1990 he stole hundreds of rare books from some of Britain’s great libraries. “The total value of the books Jacques stole is around £1.1 million. Many were damaged in an attempt to disguise their origins. Whole collections within those libraries have been devastated. Hundreds of the books have still not been recovered.” Here’s how he was caught. The Observer (UK) 05/26/02

Sunday May 26

TALKING ABOUT BOOKS: The rise of the literary festival to the point where it plays a significant part in publishing economics is a fairly recent phenomenon. If the literary festival represents the public face of contemporary letters, then it also doubles up as the chief agency for establishing its hierarchies and pecking orders.” The Guardian (UK) 05/25/02

TOP HEAVY: A critic takes issue with the notion of ranking the top 100 books of all time. “We live in a time of lists. That’s why we like awards so much: They tell us who the best writers are. That’s what we want to know: Who has the highest score. Never mind that a list of favourite books of the year, arrived at by much compromise after a discussion among three or four entirely human judges, has about as much historical significance as a list of My Favourite X-Box Games.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/25/02

Friday May 24

THE NEW PUBLISHING: Each year, about 3,500 novels are published. “While the main advantage to being published by a big press is the distribution, marketing, promotion, and visibility it can offer, all too often that kind of attention is only bestowed upon the clearly commercial novel that is already earmarked to be a winner, usually because of the author’s previous performance. Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer for all 582 Barnes & Noble superstores, says the sad truth is that only 10 percent of books get any serious marketing or PR support.” Now a new publishing model is taking hold. Poets & Writers 05/02

JUST SAY NO (TO WRITING SCHOOLS): Are writing schools a good way to teach writing? Probably not. What they do is provide a group that the solitary writer can belong to. But there are downsides. “The short story, I’d hazard, has been much diminished in Canada, where it has been subsumed to the purposes of the MFA schools. Too often, what we’re getting these days are short pieces of fiction and not short stories. Professional samples, really.” National Post 05/24/02

Thursday May 23

BLASTING THE BOOKER: The expected protests over plans to open the Booker Prize to Americans have begun. “The chairwoman of this year’s Booker judging panel, Lisa Jardine, raged that ‘the Booker will become as British an institution as English muffins in US supermarkets … more blandly generic as opposed to specifically British. This will completely change the character of the prize’.” Why is it happening? ” The Man Group, a new sponsor, has more than doubled the value of the prize this year to £50,000 ($A131,189) but, seeking greater international prominence and book sales, has insisted that US writers should be eligible by 2004.” The Age (Melbourne) 05/23/02

• A COMMONWEALTH INSTITUTION: “Corporate branding is a bad way to justify radical changes to a literary competition that has become a much-loved institution. The Booker has nurtured talent in the Commonwealth and Ireland that might not otherwise have emerged and which could easily be smothered amid a landslide of books from the US.” The Guardian (UK) 05/23/02
• TOO MANY PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES: “How to open the competition to another literary continent, yet keep the long list down to manageable proportions? At the moment judges must read about 130 novels in a year, surely as many as an honest intellectual can ever manage. So there will have to be sieving, or pre-judging, especially given the ruthlessness of the big US publishers, hungry for hype. What chance now for those unknowns – the bus-driver with his first novel – making it through to at least temporary fame?” The Guardian (UK) 05/23/02
• A STUPID IDEA BUT… “Commonwealth fiction is as good as American fiction, and doesn’t seem in any danger of being swamped. Furthermore, it can be argued (and most recently has been argued by Stephen Henighan), that there already exists a globalized literary culture that has replaced most national and regional voices. Are Salman Rushdie or Peter Carey, both Booker winners, Commonwealth writers? They both live in New York City, which is also where Rushdie’s last novel, the execrable Fury, was set.” Good Reports 05/22/02

Wednesday May 22

BRINGING THE BOOKER TO AMERICA? England’s Booker Prize, the nation’s most prestigious literary award, is considering a plan to expand the entrant pool to include American authors. Supporters say the expansion would only increase the profile of the competition, but others worry that the Booker could lose its “Englishness,” and point out that the plan comes on the heels of a new sponsorship for the prize from a company rumored to be looking for ways to make inroads in the U.S. BBC 05/22/02

ACCLAIM BUT NO SALES: Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children has got all the promotional and critical boosts an author could want. Yet “data from the research marketing firm Bookscan suggest Creating a Life has sold fewer than 8,000 copies. The peculiar fate is the publishing world’s mystery of the year. How could a book with such exposure — on the hot-button topic of reconciling motherhood and career — sell so abysmally?” The New York Times 05/21/02

Tuesday May 21

KEEPING TABS: One of a librarian’s biggest chores is keeping track of where books are. Now a new radio tag might help solve the problem. “Unlike bar codes, which need to be scanned manually and read individually, radio ID tags do not require line-of-site for reading. Multiple tags can be read simultaneously, through packaging or book covers. With radio ID tags, librarians can automate check-ins and returns. Patrons can speed through self-checkout without any assistance or ever even opening a book.” Wired 05/21/02

READING IN DARK IS BAD: Your parents were right – reading in the dark is bad for your eyes. A researcher reports that “the way we use our eyes when young can affect the way the eyes develop.” He salso says that rates of myopia are increasing. BBC 05/21/02

Monday May 20

READERS DESERT UK LIBRARIES: A new study reports that use of British libraries is shrinking. The report says that “since 1992 visits to libraries have fallen by 17%. In the same period spending on books has fallen by a third, and 9% fewer libraries are open for 30 or more hours a week – although the national library budget has remained stable, at £770 million a year.” Why – readers complain of shabby building and limited selection.” The Guardian (UK) 05/17/02

ART OF REDIRECTION: You go to the Amazon website, type in the name of the book you’re looking for, and when your book comes up, it’s accompanied by a suggestion to try another book instead. “Two weeks ago, Amazon’s Web site added a feature that lets users suggest that shoppers buy a different book than the one being perused.” The New York Times 05/20/02

ART YES, BUT SUITABLE? Mark Read is Australia’s best-selling true crime author. His partner, illustrator Adam Cullen is an Archibald Prize winner. They’ve collaborated on a horrific little book called Hooky the Cripple, that has the Australian “art world, literary circles and parents’ groups raising eyebrows,” with suggestions it ought to be banned from libraries. “It is a curiously poetic little book, a fine balance between mawkish tragedy, revenge thriller and ironic courtroom drama.” The Age (Melbourne) 05/20/02

RICH AND SPIRITUAL: A bookstore worker sees trends in buying converge. “Sept. 11 may have sparked a renaissance in learning about Islam and the Middle East, but the economic downturn has inspired an even greater rash of financial book buying at my place of employment. This war on terrorism, fought with a fever-pitch moral righteousness against ‘evildoers’ and the like, has much in common with modern business strategy as espoused by today’s bestsellers, which often blend scorched-earth war rhetoric with financial advice.” Salon 05/20/02

Friday May 17

WHO READS THE BOOK REVIEWS? “What is the role of print reviews and features in catalyzing book sales? A quick check of the sales rankings on Amazon.com following major reviews in national newspapers such as the New York Times, USA Today or the Wall St. Journal confirms that those publications can have a significant commercial impact. But publicists across the industry say it’s next to impossible for a single review or feature to make a bestseller.” Publishers Weekly 05/13/02

NEXT IT’LL BE METAL DETECTORS AND A BOARDING PASS: One of the more comfortable places to hang out in Tacoma Washington in you’re homeless is the Tacoma Public Library, where it’s warm and dry. This week the library’s directors approved a “behavior rule that would restrict patrons from bringing bedrolls, big boxes or bulky bags into the library. Under the rule, a visitor’s belongings must fit comfortably under his or her chair and measure no larger than 18 inches long by 16 inches wide by 10 inches high.” We’re not discriminating against homeless people, say’s the library’s director. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/16/02

Thursday May 16

SAVING THE GREAT POETS: Libraries have recordings of some of the great poets of the 20th Century. “Often these tapes were made in casual settings where the poets felt free to muse, explain and joke as well as read. But the recordings, many of them decades old, are in poor condition” and disintegrating. So poetry centers are trying to transfer the recordings to digital storage to save them. The New York Times 05/16/02

OXFORD AMERICAN MAY FOLD: The decade-old literary magazine Oxford American, which tags itself “the Southern Magazine of Good Writing,” is in serious danger of closing up shop, after publisher and chief bill-payer John Grisham decided that it was time for the magazine to either break even or shut down. There is still time for the magazine to be saved, probably through new ownership, but Grisham isn’t willing to wait forever. Nando Times (AP) 05/15/02

Wednesday May 15

TAKING REVIEWS ONLINE: American newspapers may be cutting their book sections, but online book reviews are flourishing. “Harriet Klausner has written over 3,000 online reviews and ranks as Amazon’s No. 1 reviewer. A publicist at one of New York’s prestigious houses who requested anonymity said Klausner’s reviews matter to her more than some city newspapers. ‘A single review of hers shows up on hundreds of sites. She’s as important as some syndicated newspapers in terms of reaching readers’.” Wired 05/14/02

IRONY IN CONTEXT: So some in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia want to ban To Kill a Mockingbird because it contains the “n” word. Stupid right? But maybe there’s a little problem with cultural context going on here. “When you use an anachronistic text to teach a moral lesson, it can become a double agent working for the opposite side; its overearnestness and its lack of contemporary code become ripe for irony. In practice, a well-meaning text of yesteryear can become a form of hate lit – inarguable, because it is shrouded in irony.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/14/02

BROKEN SYSTEM: At a time when Canadian authors are big news, there are “myriad problems in the secretive and delusional world of Canadian book distribution and retailing. The problems are neither new or surprising. Revealing them to public scrutiny is an opportunity to rethink some of the ways books are distributed and sold in this country.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/15/02

Tuesday May 14

DUBLIN PRIZE: French writer Michel Houellebecq is the winner of the annual $90,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his second novel, Atomised, about “half brothers who have little in common apart from their mother.” Nando Times (AP) 05/13/02

DOWNWARD SPIRAL? One book industry inside is pessimistic about the long-range future of the business. “With record numbers of new books published every year, a more liquid market for used books online, fewer books going out of print thanks to print-on-demand technology, and overall unit sales stagnant or even declining, the mathematical collision is disastrous – lower sales for all but a few titles. And a potential decline in young readers will make the situation worse when those kids grow up. It raises urgent questions about everything from book pricing to how we treat reading in our society and use technology to grow audiences.” Washington Post 05/14/02

WE OPNIONATE, YOU DECIDE: Does fairness count anymore? Are we bored by it? “In the April 21 issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, nearly half the top ten nonfiction bestsellers belong to a genre that middle-of-the-road innocents might label ‘one-sided,’ ‘unbalanced,’ ‘exclusionary’ or worse, though the Times’s blurbs artfully avoid the issue. Maybe we’ve entered an era in which publishers and readers no longer care about two hands working at complementary tasks – about evidence and counterevidence, arguments and counterarguments, decency toward subject matter.” The Nation 05/20/02

MOBY GOES TO BOOKEXPO: For all the hoopla and jostling and depressing observations one could make, last week’s BookExpo in New york was heaven for book lovers. “Did I mention someone dressed up as Benjamin Franklin was there, too? Also, a guy in a green suit covered in question marks. Also, a couple dressed up like miners, wearing overalls and helmets with lanterns on them.” MobyLives 05/13/02

THE UNREADABLE BEST-SELLER: Jean M Auel has sold some “34 million books worldwide and she has been translated into 26 languages.” Yet you likely have never heard of her – her books are rarely reviewed. Maybe there’s a reason – The Shelters of Stone is not an easy book to review. “Actually, it is not an easy book to read at all for anybody of any literary sensitivity whatsoever. It is absurd from beginning to end and stupefyingly boring, too.” So what’s the appeal? London Evening Standard 05/13/02

Monday May 13

BOOK PARTY: The recent BookExpo in New York is considered by most attendees to have been a success. Given recent difficulties in the book industry, the mood down on the exhibit floor was “refreshingly upbeat.” Publishers Weekly 05/13/02 

LOOKING AT THE TOP 100: The poll that ranked the top 100 books of all time and put Don Quixote atop the list surprised many. Not Shakespeare? Not Homer or Tolstoy? “Of the 100 titles, more than two thirds were written by European authors, almost half were written in the 20th century and only 11 were written by women.” The Scotsman 05/13/02

Friday May 10

YOU MEAN THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO SELL BOOKS? One of the U.K.’s leading writers has lashed out at British booksellers who, she claims, have sacrificed diversity and range of stock for massive displays featuring guaranteed best-sellers like the Harry Potter series. One of the bookshops singled out by A.S. Byatt has responded that while it certainly makes a point of marketing the big-name titles, it also stocks fully half of all books currently available in print. BBC 05/10/02

NOT THAT ANYONE STILL CARES, BUT… A settlement has been reached between Houghton Mifflin, publisher of the Gone With the Wind parody The Wind Done Gone, and the estate of original Wind author Margaret Mitchell, nearly a year after the last court challenge ended. The original gripe was ostensibly over copyright infringement and freedom of speech, but, like most things, it turned out to really be about money. Nando Times (AP) 05/09/02

IS CENSORSHIP ALL BAD? Yet another silly book flap over an attempt to ban To Kill A Mockingbird for its use of the word ‘nigger’ is sparking discussion at the offices of Canada’s National Post. In a discussion with two editors, the paper’s cultural writer puts forward the unpopular notion that “the so-called intelligentsia… are too quick to slap around ordinary people who have entirely authentic concerns about the effect of language and even ideas on their constituencies.” Also, is censoring Harper Lee somehow more egregious an offense than censoring Agatha Christie? National Post (Canada) 05/10/02

Thursday May 9

BOOK SALES SOAR: The first quarter was a blockbuster one for the book trade. “The largest gain was in adult hardcover, where sales moved up nearly 61% over the first quarter of 2001, while children’s hardcover sales had a 47.8% increase. Trade paperback sales were up almost 25% and children’s paperback sales increased 31.2%. Mass market paperback sales were ahead 20.5%.” Publishers Weekly 05/07/02

EVER HEARD OF… Is it just an illusion that service in book shops is getting worse? Hmnnn… At one London bookseller, “I ask if he knows of a book called The Colour Orange by Alice Walker. ‘Let’s put the title in and see what comes up,’ he says. There is no exact match, but there is a book with the words orange and colour in the title and then a lot of symbols. ‘Could that be it?’ he says and pushes the screen round. It is about metallurgy. I tell him that I think it’s a novel. ‘Is it possible you’ve got the wrong title?’ he asks. I concede that it is. There follows a stumped silence.” The Guardian (UK) 05/07/02

INSPIRING SALES: While some general interest publishers have been cutting back, inspirational/religious books have surged recently. “The books range from the serious Christian, Jewish and Buddhist (and lately some Muslim) works through New Age buckle-down about self-help to stuff that would embarrass P. T. Barnum. For many readers apparently, these books bring a kind of religion to those who don’t want a traditional one. Whatever, secular publishers are into it heavily.” The New York Times 05/09/02

Wednesday May 8

TOP OF THE WINDMILLS: A poll of leading international authors names Don Quixote as the best work of fiction ever. “Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century novel about a knight crazed by reading too many romances about chivalry, who goes on a mad quest accompanied by his levelheaded servant, was comfortably ahead of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the poll of 100 writers from 54 countries. It eclipsed the plays of Shakespeare and works by authors from Homer to Tolstoy.” The New York Times (Reuters) 05/08/02

HARRY DELAYED? Harry Potter fans have been eagerly awaiting the September release of the next installment of the boy wizard’s adventures. But JK Rowling has “still not delivered the manuscript for the book to her publishers and has refused to give any hints about when it will be ready. But unless it is completed within the next few weeks, her publishers, Bloomsbury, will fail to meet their target publication date of September this year.” The Scotsman 05/08/02

READING CUTS: Several American newspapers have reduced their books coverage. And at least some of them haven’t logged many complaints by readers. “I defy you to find any newspaper research that shows book sections at the top of the list of what people want to read.” US News & World Reports 05/05/02

• COLD TYPE: Canadian newspapers are making even deeper cuts in books sections than US publications. “Book pages seldom, if ever, make money. Even though newspapers pay shockingly low fees to reviewers, book pages are often a loss leader because the advertising from publishers and retailers cannot support the cost of the pages.” Ryerson Review of Journalism Summer 02

Tuesday May 7

HOOKED ON AN E-READ: After lots of buzz a few years ago about how e-publishing was going to transform the book business, e-books still account for less than 1 percent of all books sold. Now e-publishers are starting an education initiative. “Enticing people to try reading on their favorite handheld device will undoubtedly convince many of them to start reading e-books on a regular basis.” Wired 05/07/02

Monday May 6

YOU TOO, CAN START A BOOK CLUB: They all lamented the end of Oprah’s stories book club (they’ll miss the sales, natch). But since Oprah’s news, all sorts of celebs have stepped up to start their own clubs. And it turns out that guess what – even the dumbest of them (oops, did we say that out loud Kelly Ripa?) sell a ton of books. Ah, the power of TV…(and you thought it was th love of reading). MobyLives 05/06/02

A SICK INDUSTRY: Last week’s collapse of Canada’s major distributor of books was no surprise. The company hadn’t been paying publishers for about a year. “Two years ago, I made what seemed to me a startling discovery about Canadian book publishing — that even when everyone knows something is terribly wrong, no one is prepared to speak publicly about it. A code of silence prevails. It is considered better to face a looming catastrophe stoically than to draw attention to it.” Toronto Star 05/05/02

FIGHTING BOOK THEFT: Each year 100 million books worth £750 million are stolen off UK bookstore shelves (true crime books are most stolen, reports one bookseller). Now some possible high tech tagging help in cutting down theft. “Unlike the acoustic magnetic tags attached to CDs, DVDs and videos, which set off an alarm unless they are deactivated before the customer leaves the shop, the tags contain a silicon chip which can carry a large amount of information and an antenna able to transmit that information to a reading device.” BBC 04/30/02

Sunday May 5

POETIC TREASURE: Chicago-based Poetry Magazine is ninety years old. It has introduced the work of “virtually every major American poet of the 20th century, including Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore.” Each year the magazine gets 90,000-100,000 submissions and the staff says it reads every one. Chicago Sun-Times 05/05/02

FOREIGN-OWNED OR DEATH? Canadian law prohibits selling a Canadian publisher to a foreign buyer. But there are no obvious Canadian buyers for the large General Publishing Co. after the company filed for bankruptcy protection last week. So maybe the Canadian government will make an exception to the ownership rule rather than let the company fold? The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/04/02

• Previously: CANADIAN CRISIS: “The Canadian book publishing industry was reeling last night after Jack Stoddart, one of the largest publishers in Canada and owner of the largest distributor of Canadian books, won bankruptcy court protection from his creditors yesterday. The move leaves many book publishers across Canada struggling to stay afloat, cut off — for now — from their main source of revenue, which is the money funneled to them through Mr. Stoddart from the stores that sell their books.” National Post (Canada) 05/01/02

LIVING IN THE AFTERLIFE: Next to a hatchet-job of a biography, there’s probably nothing so damaging to a deceased popular writer’s memory and reputation as a pot-boiling sequel. The publishing industry cheerfully conspires with the process by which a good popular writer’s memory is piously demeaned by inferior imitations churned out by penurious hacks. Which brings me to the intriguing case of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is about to celebrate his 50th birthday. (Casino Royale was first published in 1953).” The Observer (UK) 05/05/02

MEMENTOS OR STORAGE PROBLEM? If you’re at all a reading person, you have to deal with where to store all your books. After you’ve stored them for years (rarely taking many of them off the shelves), the thought might occur – why do I need all these? “What are they? Memento vitae, furniture, ornament…” So you start opening them with an eye to paring down, and inevitably … The Guardian (UK) 05/04/02

Friday May 3

THE LIFE OF NOBODY: Everyone’s writing a book these days. “This is the age of memoir. Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from the American soil as in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it.” As a literary form, though, memoirs get no respect. “It is fashionable, a bid for superiority, to denigrate memoir and explain its causes in derogatory terms. The reasons have calcified. Memoir is Jerry Springer. Memoir is narcissistic. Memoir is easy. Memoir is made-up. Memoir is ubiquitous. Memoir is self-help disguised. The counter-argument also has hardened. Memoir is a genre – some practitioners are good, some not. Memoir is not new – vide Augustine. Fiction is exhausted, memoir is vital. Both sides have stated their cases over and over. The questions remain – why memoirs by nobodies? And why now?” Alternet 05/01/02

END OF RUN: Seattle’s Poetry Northwest is the longest-running poetry-only publication in America. But “after 43 years of publication, the poetry quarterly from the University of Washington is shutting down with its Spring 2002 issue.” The publication “was given a two-year reprieve by the university amid a financial crisis in 2000, but the magazine’s supporters have been unable to locate another source of funding and it will have to cease publication.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/021/02

Thursday May 2

NAT’L MAG AWARDS HONOR THE BIG PLAYERS: “The National Magazine Awards, the Oscars of the industry, proved Wednesday that a media-wide gap between the haves and have-nots may well be widening in a melancholy period for the magazine industry, with stalwarts The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly each taking home three of the 19 first-place prizes.” Chicago Tribune 05/02/02

THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW: The bankruptcy of General Publishing, Canada’s largest publishing and distribution house, continues to have a terrifying effect on the country’s book industry. The latest scenario may have General cutting its losses by selling to a foreign buyer, although a special exemption from a Canadian law prohibiting such sales would have to be obtained first. Toronto Star 05/02/02

SINGING PRAISES OF THE OED: “Why should a maturing book-lover know or care what the Oxford English Dictionary is? Well, let me give you an analogy: The OED is to the average dictionary what the Louvre is to a garage sale with a few antiques. All of us book-lovers, at some point, become vividly conscious of this lexicographic masterpiece, in the same way that as adults with maturing palates and troublesome colons we come to adore olive paste, oysters, and fiber supplements.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 04/29/02

• WORKING AWMERICAN: Likewise, Webster’s isn’t just another dictionary. “What Noah Webster proposed was simply to teach all Americans to spell and speak alike, yet differently in detail from the people of England. The result would be an ‘American language, to become over the years as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another’.” Okay, so it didn’t quite work out that way, but it does explain some things… Times Literary Supplement 04/27/02

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S DESCENDANTS? This past week, representatives of the estate of Virginia Woolf blasted a San Francisco publisher for the release of a rough early work which had previously been available only for scholarly study. Strangely, however, the estate had previously given its permission for the new trade edition, and the publisher claims to be completely flummoxed by the shots being fired across her bow. Boston Globe 05/02/02

HOW TO ACT LIKE A ROCK STAR ON YOUR BOOK TOUR: His name is Neil Pollack, and he may or may not be fictional. He may or may not be Dave Eggers. (His mother swears he’s not.) He may or may not be the most exciting thing to happen to Canadian literature since Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. And he most definitely does not care what you or Margaret Atwood or the stuffy old publishing industry thinks about any of it. National Post (Canada) 05/01/02

Wednesday May 1

CANADIAN CRISIS: “The Canadian book publishing industry was reeling last night after Jack Stoddart, one of the largest publishers in Canada and owner of the largest distributor of Canadian books, won bankruptcy court protection from his creditors yesterday. The move leaves many book publishers across Canada struggling to stay afloat, cut off — for now — from their main source of revenue, which is the money funneled to them through Mr. Stoddart from the stores that sell their books.” National Post (Canada) 05/01/02

TOME RAIDER: A man dubbed by police the “Tome Raider” who stole 412 extremely rare antique books and pamphlets worth an estimated £1.1 million from libraries and then sold them at auctions is today facing a lengthy jail term. His haul was “one of the biggest of its kind in British legal history. Some of the books have been returned to the libraries but hundreds of them have never been traced.” The Guardian (UK) 04/30/02

ART BOOK ABDICATION: Australia’s premiere art book publisher was sold last year. Now some authors have been told by the new owners that the company is not obligated to pay royalties negotiated under the previous owners. Other writers have had their projects canceled. Sydney Morning Herald 05/01/02

• TOUGH ON ART BOOKS: Australia has a dearth of art book publishers. It’s a tough business. “All art publishers face the problem of how to make a profit on lavish, labour-intensive books which, at retail prices of $50 to $100, sell only a few thousand copies at most. Authors generally pay copyright and reproduction fees for artworks; at up to $250 an image, this can consume advances and royalties.” Because of the costs, vanity publishing is common and credibility is low. Sydney Morning Herald 05/01/02

PAPA’S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG: With two major U.S. publishers folding their e-book imprints, and horror writer Stephen King abandoning an online writing venture a few chapters in, this might not seem like the best time for anyone to launch a massive new e-books project. Nonetheless, “Ernest Hemingway is to become one of the first major authors to have his whole literary catalogue put on the internet. The 23 novels will be available for people to read on their computers for less than the price of most paperbacks.” BBC 05/01/02

CORRECTING THE NORTH AMERICAN NOVEL: So what’s the big deal about Johnathan Franzen, anyway? The author who snubbed Oprah has some very interesting ideas about North American literature, and he is determined to change what he sees as a lazy literary culture which ignores the context of the larger world in favor of introspection and glorified navel-gazing. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/01/02

Tuesday April 30

WHERE BOOKS DO BUSINESS: Publishers and bookstore owners gather in New York for BookExpo America, the industry’s annual confab. The gathering is “the place where the publishing industry most clearly demonstrates the obsession with merchandise and marketing. Publishers often upstage each other with spectacles that are a far cry from the solitary pursuits of reading and writing. This year particularly the event will resemble a circus.” The New York Times 04/29/02

BIG PLANS FOR THE BOOKER: Last week the Booker Prize and its new sponsor announced that the prize money for the winning book would jump from £20,000 to £50,000. But it looks like even bigger changes might be afoot, including expanding the award to include North America. The Independent (UK) 04/26/02

THE BIG BIG THING: Big money is ruining publishing, some say, forcing publishers to chase after elusive blockbusters at the expense of everything else. “Publishers are, in the main, putting out fewer titles and then really going after the big ones as hard as they can. You can’t go into a bookshop with 300 titles and say `Here is my list’. You have to tell them, `This is the book that will get a massive marketing and advertising campaign’. And you can only do it for the big books.” The Age (Melbourne) 04/30/02

Monday April 29

WHY NEWSPAPERS ARE CUTTING BOOK COVERAGE: In the past year American newspapers have cut back on their coverage of books. “Everybody’s hurting: Why should book coverage be any different? Because book pages were different. Big-city papers aspiring to any stature have traditionally presented services that rarely pay their way in ad sales. Such public services permit papers to hold their heads up as civic assets and not just dealers in wood pulp. These include investigative reports, op-ed columns, letters pages, foreign news, special coverage of disasters – and book reviews and essays. No, books weren’t included solely for snob value. Dailies do believe they educate and inform and maybe even elevate the local discourse. It’s what separates them from Teen People.” Dallas Morning News 04/28/02

WRITERS IN THE (WRONG) LIGHT: The New York Times recently had a fashion spread of prominent writers wearing very expensive clothes. Now, everyone knows most writers don’t make lots of money. And even when they do, they’re usually not the high-fashion model types. So why the con? “Does this seem petty to you? It’s not. This is what’s wrong with our culture now: everything comes down to money, or appearance. Writing is supposed to examine that, and remind us to look deeper. If writers actually participate in the obfuscation, and further our disconnect from meaningfulness, then all is lost.” MobyLives 04/29/02

BOOK SALES UP IN UK: Sales of books were up 5 percent in the UK in 2001, with British consumers spening £2.15 billion on books. “Strongest growth in the retail sector came from book and stationery shops, large chain bookshops, bargain bookshops and supermarkets. Independent and specialist bookshops fared worse, with purchases falling for two consecutive years. Book clubs did not perform well and purchasing on the Internet was flat—4% by units and 5% by pounds.” Publishers Weekly 04/26/02

• CUTS AT READER’S DIGEST: Reader’s Digest, which has been struggling for some time, is cutting 100 jobs and scaling back its promotions in an effort to stabilize its declining business. Publishers Weekly 04/26/02

USED (OR ABUSED)? So Amazon is prominently selling used books, and the Authors Guild is hopping mad. “Do sales of used books hurt sales of new books? Neither side has statistical evidence to support their case, and many commentators, including some authors, agreed with Bezos’ claim that buying used leaves customers with money to buy more books and this could only be good. Judging by the silence of publishers, it seems they, too, agree with Bezos. But to take the consideration too far into abstraction is to miss the obvious — if you’ve got two copies of a book listed side–by–side and they are virtually identical except one is way cheaper, which one is going to sell?” MobyLives 04/21/02

Sunday April 28

BOOKER BOOST: The Booker Prize is already one of the world’s most prestigious. Now it’s also becoming one of the most lucrative. “This autumn’s winner will take home £50,000, dwarfing the £20,000 prize money given last year to Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang. All six shortlisted writers will also get £2,500 compared with £1,000 in 2001.” The Guardian (UK) 04/26/02

BOOK CLUBS AS DO-GOODYISM: “I’m deeply bored by the U.S. citywide reading projects, and by the CBC’s Canada Reads book club, which was just another exercise in good-for-you-ism. If it were really about literary values it wouldn’t have involved actors and singers (who admitted they hadn’t read, you know, every single word . . .). I don’t think these things encourage a love of literature; they encourage patriotism. They may even discourage the disaffected — and I’m thinking of myself at about 20 here — who already see novels as some kind of community-service niceness club, and will find that view confirmed by the kinds of inoffensive books chosen by national committees, and who may never read again.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/27/02

ALL THAT’S NEEDED IS COMPETITION: When Canadians order books from Amazon – even if it’s a book by a Canadian publisher – the company would send out the American edition. Canadian publishers lose $40 million a year to this. But now there’s a Canadian version of Amazon, and some new competition in the Canadian book market. Did I just feel the earth mover? National Post 04/27/02

MUSEUM OF VERSE: It’s hard to believe no one’s thought of this before, but why shouldn’t there be a museum of poetry? Seventy-nine-year-old Bay Area poet Herman Berlandt is on a campaign to establish just such a place… San Francisco Chronicle 04/27/02

Friday April 26

RECREATING ALEXANDRIA: Big celebrations were planned for the opening of Egypt’s historic new Alexandria library. “But those celebratory plans were scuttled because of the heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Instead, Bibliotheca Alexandrina – which ostensibly replaces the original that was destroyed more than a thousand years ago – opened quietly to the public this week.” Wired 04/25/02 

UNIVERSITY PRESSES ENDANGERED: University presses are under pressure all over America. And the largest of them – the University of California – is cutting back. “As part of a general retrenchment, the UC Press will no longer produce books on philosophy, architecture, archaeology, political science or geography. It will publish dramatically less literature and far fewer works of literary theory. Twelve jobs have been eliminated through attrition, and further job cuts are planned.” San Jose Mercury News (LAT) 04/26/02

NOW EVERYBODY’S GOTTA HAVE A BOOK CLUB: Even Regis’ sidekick Kelly Ripa. Ripa announced she’s starting a book club – “Read with Ripa” and “as soon as Ripa announced the book yesterday, If Looks Could Kill moved from number 7,000 to number 7 on Amazon.com – and publisher Warner Books has ordered an additional 25,000 copies.” New York Post 04/26/02

Thursday April 25

E-BOOK AWARDS DISCONTINUED: The Frankfurt E-book Awards have been discontinued, to almost no one’s surprise. “While lack of funding killed the awards, the show had a problem that money couldn’t resolve: It was an award show created for a new technological form, yet judged on literary merit. That created confusion, especially because, as critics pointed out, many of the judges were unfamiliar with the new technology.” Wired 04/23/03

AMAZON IS PROFITABLE: Amazon.com reported growth of sales of 21 percent over the same period last year, and reported a $2 million profit, compared to a $21 million loss last year. “U.S. books, music and DVD/video sales grew 8% to $443 million.” Publishers Weekly 04/24/02

• DELIVERY IN THE REAL WORLD: Amazon announces it will give customers the option to “pick up purchased books, CDs and movies at Borders bookstores. Amazon already runs the Borders.com Web site.” Publishers Weekly 04/24/02

Tuesday April 23

MOM AND POP PUBLISHERS LAND MEGABOOK: The sequel to The Bridges of Madison County is being released this week. The book is a hot property, a followup to “the best-selling hardcover novel of all time.” But when Robert James Waller’s editors at Warner Books turned down the book, he went to his hometown bookstore in search of a publisher. “This is the story of how the proprietors of a mom-and-pop bookstore in rural Texas landed the North American rights to the sequel of the best-selling hardcover novel of all time.” Baltimore Sun 04/23/02

BOOK WINNER REVEALED IN ADVANCE BY WAREHOUSE JOE: Canada’s CBC Radio is choosing a book for the entire country to read together. It’s to be announced today, after a weeklong series “featuring five prominent Canadians who had each picked works of Canadian literature they thought the country should read. The panel then voted the books off the list one by one during discussions.” So which book wins? Turns out the winner has been revealed in advance by a book warehouse worker hired to slap CBC stickers on the book. National Post (Canada) 04/23/02

NORA WHO? “Nora Roberts is one of the best-kept secrets in American book publishing, the (petite, red-haired) elephant in the middle of the room. She sold about 14 million mass-market paperbacks last year, more than John Grisham, Tom Clancy or Stephen King. In the past 20 years, she has produced 145 novels and had 69 New York Times best sellers.” Chicago Tribune 04/23/02

Monday April 22

SCOTLAND’S CONTROVERSIAL LIBRARY EXTENSION: A major expansion of Scotland’s National Library has been approved by the government. But “objections to the extension plans had been raised by the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust, Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland and the Cockburn Association, which claimed the design and materials to be used were ‘uninspiring’.” The Scotsman 04/19/02

TOO VIOLENT TO READ: Egypt’s ambitious new Alexandria Library is “11 stories high and can hold up to eight million books. The total cost of the library was $220 million and it has taken 11 years to complete.” Problem is, though it is finished, it hasn’t yet opened, and its inauguration has been postponed because of violence and security concerns. Middle East Times 04/19/02

Sunday April 21

SUBJECT TO REVIEW: What makes an author great, or a novel a classic? Although we may not want to admit it, literary greatness is just as subjective as the success of whichever bubble gum pop act is making teenage girls shriek on MTV this week. “Literature, which some may like to conceive of as an immutable set of timeless verities, solid as granite and fixed as the stars, instead is every bit as fragile as any other human creation.” Chicago Tribune 04/21/02

• YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN: “Every lifetime reader has sweet memories of books read in adolescence that were totally captivating, that changed his or her outlook on life, that opened new worlds. The question is: do we dare revisit these books 20 or 30 years later? It can be like seeing your first love after all these years, and now she has a sullen look and you realize it was always there and how could you have missed it?” Toronto Star 04/20/02

Thursday April 18

ART OF PACKAGING LITERATURE: “Building an author’s career, particularly a writer of literary fiction, is a brick-upon-brick process, and tending to that structure is what the business is about.” So “why are first literary novels — the hardest sell in book publishing — afforded the more expensive hardcover start? Because so many book reviewers are snobbish about things literary and get nervous about reviewing even trade paperbacks, a format they tend not to take seriously. (Forget mass-market paperback entirely when it comes to reviewing.)” The New York Times 04/18/02

Wednesday April 17

WHAT SHOULD LIBRARIES BE IN THE DIGITAL AGE? With so much information flowing through the internet, what should the role of libraries which are the traditional repositories of information, be? “Digital technology has split the confluence of medium and content hitherto known as the book. While information’s infrastructure is public domain, information itself is a private commodity. Intermediaries such as booksellers and librarians have now become superfluous in certain areas of the information market. This is especially true in the realm of scientific, medical and technical literature, which by trying to combine two incompatible functions is both expensive and inefficient.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/16/02

FAILING TO DE-LINK AMAZON: Publishers and authors are generally not heeding the Authors Guild call to take links to Amazon.com off their websites to protest Amazon’s sales of used books. Why? “Using an average book that sells 30,000 copies a year, Amazon sales account for 7 to 8 percent, or 2,100 copies. Used books account for approximately 15 percent of that number – that’s 315 books a year. Those used copies, however, will be read and create a broader readership through word of mouth. In fact, several authors and smaller publishers said they are happy to lose a little business in exchange for the cheap and direct way Amazon offers to cultivate a readership.” Wired 04/16/02

STUDENTS DON’T READ CANADIAN: Canada’s writers may be winning all sorts of awards, but Canadian students aren’t reading the home-grown books. A new study says that the average Canadian student reads five Canadian books by the time of graduation. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/17/02

Tuesday April 16

REALITY PROGRAMMING, CANADIAN STYLE: Celebrities go on CBC radio to try to convince people that the book they are talking about should be the book the entire country reads. At the end of each round, people vote one book “off the island.” An interesting way to pick a book for the entire country to read? “What I have trouble with, first of all, is the underlying notion that the only way listeners will participate in Canada Reads is if famous personalities – well, at least ‘world-famous coast to coast’ – tell us what to read. It isn’t possible to find a single novel that captures the imagination of an entire country.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/16/02

• COMMON BOOK, COMMON DREAMS? “The problem we wrestled with for some time was if you want to get the country to read one book, how do you choose? We did not want it to be a CBC decision. We decided to seek the opinions of Canadians who had some reputation of their own and whom we knew were assiduous readers. Most of the people we approached agreed to do it.” Toronto Star 04/16/02

DEFENDING THE RIGHT TO BE USED: Last week the American Authors Guild organized a protest against Amazon because the company is selling used books alongside new volumes. Amazon head Jeff Bezos has answered the Guild’s call for an authors’ boycott of Amazon links “by e-mailing both individuals and stores around the country who had sold used books through Amazon.com. He asked them to defend Amazon’s contention that used books actually help authors by bringing in new readers who otherwise couldn’t afford to buy a book. “We’ve found that our used books business does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact, the opposite has happened.” Nando Times (AP) 04/15/02

FORMULA ONE WRITING: Harlequin, the schlocky bodice-ripper publisher, is trying to go up-market. “Inspired by the success of ‘chick lit’ – stories of fallible, single professional women in the mould of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary – the company is launching a new line of books designed to depict women’s real lives.” Sydney Morning Herald (AP) 04/16/02

Monday April 15

KINGS OF U.S. FICTION: Which author sold the most books in the US last year? Good try if you answered John  Grisham; he led the list the previous seven years. No, the “top-selling work of hardback fiction in the US last year was written by the Reverend Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Desecration, the ninth volume in the series Left Behind, sold 2,969,458 copies, nearly a million ahead of Grisham. If the literati of New York look down on Grisham, the other two are too low even to register on their radar screens. The Age (Melbourne) 04/15/02

WHO MAKES BOOKS EXPENSIVE? Why do book prices get higher with every passing year? Is it the publishers’ fault, as Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio has been saying to all and any who will listen? Nonsense, say the publishers. Just look who gets the biggest percentage of every sale… MobyLives 04/15/02

BUCKS FOR STAR WRITERS: Is it fair that big movie stars can earn tens of millions of dollars out of a film’s budget? Must be, or the studios wouldn’t do it. Now the same thing is happening to books, where enormous advances are being gambled on authors. “Increasingly, the big publishers are becoming like financing and distributing houses. They’re like the major film studios in Hollywood. It’s like opening a film at 300 theatres if Tom Cruise is starring in it. Everybody evaluates risk differently, but they’re betting on a pretty sure thing.” National Post 04/11/02

Thursday April 11

McEWAN WINS SMITH: Ian McEwan’s book Atonement wins Britain’s WH Smith literary prize. “The award is the first for a work regarded as a near-masterpiece by many critics. Though one of the literary best sellers of the year, it did not win the biggest cash prizes, the Whitbread and the Booker.” The Guardian (UK) 04/10/02

OUT OF BOOKS/OUT OF IDEAS: So Oprah’s run out of books that meet the test of quality for her book club. “There seems something churlish and—dare I say it?—elitist about this majestic dismissal. True, trendy academics have been issuing gnomic declarations about the death of the novel for the last 30 years or so. But Oprah? How could she and her staff have exhausted the range of existing share-worthy fiction (including backlists!) in a mere five years? One answer, of course, is that Oprah was selecting a very special kind of fiction.” Slate 04/10/02

Wednesday April 10

THE RIGHT TO A PRIVATE READ: The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that a Denver bookstore (the Tattered Cover) owner does not have to provide police with a list of people who bought a book  on how to make illegal drugs. “The high court declared that the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.” Wired 04/09/02

PRIVACY TEST: “Calling the court’s opinion ‘a primer on the First Amendment,’ Tattered Cover’s lawyer, Daniel Recht of Recht & Kornfeld, said that the ruling has ‘huge national significance’ because this is the first of the 50 state supreme courts to address the issue.” Publishers Weekly 04/09/02

FLEETING FAME: “The curious thing about bestsellers: their popularity is often shorter than the span of their readers’ lives. As Germaine Greer rather sourly remarks of Lolita: ‘Bestsellers are never bestsellers for the right reasons.’ In the end, though, it’s the ephemerality of the bestseller that’s so fascinating. They are such fragile flowers: the merest waft from a passing new trend consigns them to outer darkness.” The Telegraph (UK) 04/10/02 

OPEN LETTER TO OPRAH: “Naturally, I have heard a variety of cynical theories about the real reason you’re downsizing your book club: Ratings for the book-themed shows are abysmally low. Many authors – after months of isolation in dark garrets, scribbling away – don’t make scintillating guests. Or maybe you’re just sick and tired of the whole literature thing. If that was it, I wish you’d simply leveled with us. Had you said, ‘Look, folks, I’m sick of reading novels all the time. I want a life. I want to veg out and watch TV and paint my toenails, OK? Give me a break. I’m not in high school anymore and there isn’t a crabby old English teacher breathing down my neck for me to finish `Silas Marner,’ OK?’ I could’ve respected that.” Chicago Tribune 04/10/02

• NARROW SCOPE: Are there too few good books for Oprah to choose from? “She tends to pick novels that appeal to a broad group of people,” he said. Her power tends to make publishers want to buy the kind of work of which she’ll approve – which in turn makes contemporary fiction all run together, sounding alike, causing her to find few new novels that excite her. By picking books that way, she may be contributing to the problem she’s complaining about.” Chicago Tribune 04/10/02
• WHOM OPRAH HELPED: The publishing industry has been crying about the news that Oprah’s Book Club is winding down. So “which publishers and authors benefited most from Oprah over the course of her club, and which of her selections saw a relatively small jump?” Publishers Week 04/09/02

DE-LINKING AMAZON: Thousands of websites link to Amazon.com promoting sales of books they care about. Now, to protest Amazon selling used books alongside new ones, the Authors Guild is urging webmasters to take down their Amazon links. “We believe it is in our members’ best interests to de-link their websites from Amazon. There’s no good reason for authors to be complicit in undermining their own sales. It just takes a minute, and it’s the right thing to do.” Wired 04/09/02

Tuesday April 9

THE FIX WAS IN? Alt-paper Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon is getting more flak for its fiction contest, in which the entry chosen by the three judges was overturned by the paper’s arts editor. Was it racism, as some critics are charging, or was it just a “plain old–fashioned, unethical fix?” MobyLives 04/09/02

• Previously: RUSH TO JUDGMENT: Portland alternative weekly Willamette Week announced a writing contest, engaged some judges, then chose a winner different from who the judges picked. Now the judges are complaining, and WW arts editor (who actually chose the winner herself) explains: “I planned to use their feedback to aid me in making a final decision – and to run as comments alongside the winners when they ran in the paper. In retrospect, perhaps even calling them judges was inappropriate. Maybe Subcommittee for the Advancement of Literary License or Footsoldiers in the War Against Cliché would have been more correct…” Willamette Week 03/18/02

WHEN CRITICS COLLIDE: Critics disagree all the time, of course. But rarely has opinion diverged so completely over Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. According to the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, this is “an enthralling story”, a “remarkable” and “astonishing” book, “a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature”. Peter Craven’s review in The Age, on the other hand called it “a monstrosity of a book. I cannot believe that a novel like this has been put before the public with such a mishmash of verbal collisions, such lapses of judgment and such evasions of pace”. At least they have opinions? The Age (Melbourne) 04/09/02

TODAY’S NEW BOOK CLUB: Just as Oprah cuts down her popular book club, NBC’s Today Show says it will start its own book club. “It would be silly for us to say, ‘Oh we just had this idea today.’ But the truth is that it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time, so with Oprah stepping back from the book world, it just seemed natural for us to seize the opportunity.” The show has always featured books. “The truth is we introduced America to John Grisham.” New York Post 04/09/02

• WHY OPRAH QUIT: It’s not because it’s too hard to find a good book to feature. She was rankled by criticism of her choices. And besides: ” ‘It was a very arduous and careful screening process, and was taking a serious toll on Oprah and her staff. It was the single hardest thing the TV show had to do.’ That’s right – finding, reading and recommending one good novel or collection of stories a month. Can you imagine if she’d had to wade through histories and biographies?” Philadelphia Inquirer 04/09/02

LITERARY PRODUCT PLACEMENT: Writer Jim Munroe has a new book. In it, he mentions a number of corporations. So he decided to bill the companies he names $10 each for “product placement,” just as they do in the movies. So far no takers. “A lot of people think it was this big promotional thing, and it obviously brings attention to the book and the issues in the book, but for me, it was a pretty natural thing. When I was going through the manuscript, to edit and revise it and stuff, I was like ‘Man, I wish I didn’t have to mention all these corporations.’ It sort of bugged me that I was mentioning them … But the whole point of the book is to draw attention to the fact that we’re totally corporatized, but at the same time I’m also mentioning all these corporations.” Ottawa Citizen 04/07/02

Monday April 8

ALL THAT MONEY: “Last week, after reading just a one-page proposal from Charles Frazier, Random House bought the National Book Award winner’s next novel for what sources close to the deal said was $8.25 million. The publishing community was hardly through gasping—no one could recall a piece of literary fiction selling for so much—when producer Scott Rudin, who’s known for buying high-toned literature (Angela’s Ashes, The Corrections), got his hands on the proposal. Rudin pitched Frazier a John Ford-style drama to be directed by Peter Weir. Before anyone else had a chance to bid, he snapped up the movie rights for more than $3 million. Then the second-guessing started.” Newsweek 04/15/02

ODE TO THE QUEEN MUM: Andrew Motion has written the biggest charge of his career as England’s Poet Laureate – a poem commemorating the death of the Queen Mother. “He delivered his words to the Queen and Prince Charles on Friday but was in his London office until the last moment, agonising over ‘the proper combination of left- and right-hand brains’.” Sydney Morning Herald 04/08/02

THE ERRONEOUS OPRAH REPORT: Several publications reported Friday and over the weekend that Oprah was discontinuing her popular Book Club [including USAToday, which also printed a list of all the books Oprah has selected]. But in fact, she’s just cutting back the number of books the club will tackle [see next item] USA Today 04/08/02

• Previously: OPRAH CUTS BACK: For six years Oprah’s Book Club has been a publishing world phenomenon. Last year the club was said to be responsible for sales of 12 million books. Now Oprah says she’ll cut back the number of books the club will read on her popular talk show. “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share. I will continue featuring books on the Oprah Winfrey Show when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation.” Chicago Tribune 04/07/02
• OF HIGH ART AND POPULAR READING: Being an author in Oprah Winfrey’s book club carried many rewards, but also came at a price for serious authors, just as Book-of-the-Month Club authors of a previous generation found. Jonathan Franzen’s dissing of Oprah last fall curiously cast the author in the chump role as he was raising reasonable concerns. Boston Review 04/02

Sunday April 7

OPRAH CUTS BACK: For six years Oprah’s Book Club has been a publishing world phenomenon. Last year the club was said to be responsible for sales of 12 million books. Now Oprah says she’ll cut back the number of books the club will read on her popular talk show. “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share. I will continue featuring books on the Oprah Winfrey Show when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation.” Chicago Tribune 04/07/02

SALES R US: So you’ve got a publisher and a new book coming out. But your job as an author is only half over. Now you’ve got to go out and sell it. Today that’s a full time job. Hartford Courant 04/07/02

Friday April 5

CENSORSHIP LAW LIKELY TO BE THROWN OUT: If the judges’ comments are any indication, the Children’s Internet Protection Act will likely be thrown out. The law says libraries must use filtering software on their computers to prevent children from seeing pornographic websites. But every witness testifying in the challenge to the law has said the filtering programs don’t work and that they block sites that aren’t pornogaphic. Wired 04/05/02

TAKE AWAY PULITZERS? Philip Nobile says the Pulitzer board has a plagiarism problem. He says in a speech at Columbia University today that the Pulitzers of Doris Goodwin, David McCullough, and Alex Haley should be revoked because of the plagiarism found in their work, and that if action isn’t taken, the integrity of the awards is at stake. This, as the Pulitzer Board assembles at Columbia for a meeting. MobyLives 04/05/02

POWER TO EDIT: So what, then, is the value of an editor? The answer depends on the writer, and even the genre. For all writers, the editor is the author’s champion within the publishing house, the person who fights the book-jacket battle, who seduces the marketing and public relations people, who sells the writer’s work to the sales representatives so that, armed with the editor’s ebullience, they can in turn sell the book to the stores. (The truly successful editors are also rainmakers, attracting authors who want to work with them.) Generally, nonfiction writers seek more hands-on editing than literary novelists or huge best-selling commercial novelists, whose success convinces them that they don’t need much help.” The New York Times 04/05/02

AUTHOR OF PROBABILITY: A group of researchers has been applying “statistical physics and computer analysis” to ancient texts in an effort to determine who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. “Most historians attribute the classic Greek works to the poet Homer. According to the recent study, though, Homer — if such a writer existed — likely scripted the Iliad solo. But he probably had plenty of help from other poets when creating the Odyssey” Discovery 04/04/02

Thursday April 4

RELUCTANT GATEKEEPERS: Should American librarians be forced to monitor and censor websites that could be accessed from library computers, as a new law says? Librarians say no. “The ACLU and the American Library Association claim that blocking software is problematic for a number of reasons: It doesn’t do a good job of preventing access to porn, it bans many legitimate websites, and the list of verboten sites is compiled in secret by commercial vendors.” Wired 04/03/02

ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE RETOOLS: The 90-year-old magazine Architecture is retooling and its editor-in-chief is quitting. The magazine “will turn its focus from pure design to products and services, which is sure to cast it as more of a trade magazine.” The magazine’s owners say that if the makeover doesn’t improve revenues, Architecture could be closed. Design critics bemoan the move: “There will be a huge huge gap in the information available to us now.” The New York Times 04/04/02

CANADIAN INDIE TURNS 25: It was a quarter-century ago when Canada’s NeWest publishing house set up shop, using hand-cranked presses and children’s stencils alongside more sophisticated equipment, in an effort to change the face of Canadian publishing and prove that there was a place for regional independents in the corporate-dominated world of books. “Ever since, NeWest Press has been promoting the entire spectrum of Western Canadian writing to the rest of the country, with 205 titles that span fiction, drama, poetry, literary criticism, political comment and aboriginal writing.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/04/02

POET LAUREATE SWEEPS: Only a few months ago, California sent up an SOS, looking for more candidates to apply for the state’s new position of poet laureate. Evidently, the call was heeded – 55 poets were considered, and three have been chosen as finalists for the job. “Gov. Gray Davis is expected to name one of the three by July, subject to confirmation by the state Senate.” San Diego Union Tribune 04/03/02

• Previously: WON’T YOU BE MY POET… “California’s newly established poet laureate program has run into a problem. Not enough poets – just seven – have thrown their hats into the ring as nominees for the two-year office that was established last year to promote poetry in the state. ‘I wouldn’t say we’re in a panic,’ said Adam Gottlieb, spokesman for the California Arts Council, ‘but we’re close’.” Sacramento Bee 02/06/02

Wednesday April 3

POETIC PROBLEMS: “Since its inauguration in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month has reorganized the way that commercial publishers and the larger independents publish poetry, drawn unprecedented media attention to the art, and has, by some lights, boosted poetry sales. Yet this year’s festivities come on the heels of what has been a difficult year for many in the poetry world.” Publishers Weekly 04/01/02

PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING: A new book slated to be released by a small university press is generating more heat than any scholarly work since The Bell Curve, and the publisher is shocked by the venom of the detractors. Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, which argues that teens are harmed more by a lack of credible information on sex than by the threat of molestation and pedophilia, has pushed nearly every conservative button, and activists are trying to stifle the book’s impact by bullying the publisher into calling off the release. Minneapolis Star Tribune 04/03/02

Tuesday April 2

PEN/FAULKNER WINNER: Ann Patchett wins the PEN/Faulkner Award, America’s richest literary prize for her novel Bel Canto. “She beat National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sister Noon, Claire Messud’s The Hunters, and Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu. Past winners have included John Edgar Wideman, EL Doctorow and Don DeLillo – last year Philip Roth won with his novel The Human Stain.” BBC 04/02/02

GOING INDIE: A new study by Consumer Reports says that book-buyers are more satisfied shopping in independent bookstores than in big chain stores. The study “found that most people felt the chains or the equally giant on–line booksellers did indeed offer a better deal price–wise. Nonetheless, independent bookstores generated a higher level of customer satisfaction than even the cheapest chain retailer. In fact, independents scored ‘on a par with the highest–rated stores from any survey we’ve done in recent years,’ said the magazine.” MobyLives 04/02/03

DOUBLE DUTY POETRY: Maybe one of the reasons poetry doesn’t penetrate the general conciousness is the way it’s packaged. If Emily Dickinson wrote a cookbook, for example… Salon 04/01/02

CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE: Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men is at the top of the New York Times Best-seller list. This is the book that publisher HarperCollins asked Moore to rewrite after September 11 because of its criticisms of George W. Bush. Moore refused, and a campaign by librarians shamed HC into going ahead with the book as written. So why would a publisher fight so hard to avoid publishing a book it had already signed off on? Miami Herald 04/02/02

Monday April 1

CONSPIRACY THEORY: A new French book claims that the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center is a hoax, that “the plane that smashed into the Pentagon did not exist and that the world has been duped by a murky U.S. government plot.” Okay, kooks publish books all the time. But this one’s got French readers intrigued – Thierry Meyssan’s book, The Frightening Fraud, is “a popular read, according to booksellers, and has topped bestseller lists.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/01/02

RUSH TO JUDGMENT: Portland alternative weekly Willamette Week announced a writing contest, engaged some judges, then chose a winner different from who the judges picked. Now the judges are complaining, and WW arts editor (who actually chose the winner herself) explains: “I planned to use their feedback to aid me in making a final decision – and to run as comments alongside the winners when they ran in the paper. In retrospect, perhaps even calling them judges was inappropriate. Maybe Subcommittee for the Advancement of Literary License or Footsoldiers in the War Against Cliché would have been more correct…” Willamette Week 03/18/02

Friday March 29

RICHLY RISKED: What happens when an author, discovered by a publisher and earnestly promoted, strikes it big, winning prizes and selling millions of books? Well, he writes a second novel. But the author has gotten so big, the publisher who took a risk on him is unable to afford the advance – projected to be about $5 million. Charles Frazier is the author, and his second book is about to go to bid. Grove Atlantic, which published Frazier’s Cold Mountain to such acclaim, is likely out of the running because of the money involved. Fair? The New York Times 03/29/02

WHERE BOOKS GO TO DIE: What happens to books that for one reason or another fail to sell? There is, after all, a storage problem to deal with. They go to a book return company – some 25,000 a day at one firm in Essex – to be assessed. “Most are destined to be pulped. Almost 10 per cent of all newly published books end up being shredded. If your book is ever threatened with being remaindered, don’t fret about it – there are worse fates.” Sydney Morning Herald 03/29/02

RECORD PRICES FOR LINCOLN AND EINSTEIN DOCUMENTS: “An autographed manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech, delivered from the window of the White House three days before his assassination in 1865, was sold for $3,086,000 — the most ever paid for a U.S. historical document. Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the potential for ‘the construction of extremely powerful bombs,’ which helped launch U.S. research leading to the development of the atomic bomb, was sold for $2.10 million, a record price for a letter.” MSNBC 03/28/02

TIME MAY HAVE COME FOR AN UNAPPRECIATED GENRE: There are mysteries and westerns and sci-fi galore, but what happened to stories about the business world? As a category, it’s lain fallow for decades; the few examples which come to mind have been mostly satire, or forgettable (or both). One reason may be that writers have turned up their noses at the materialism of corporate life, although they’re latched onto materialism elsewhere with little trouble. “Why haven’t business journalists filled the breach? Our hunch is a lack of imagination stands in the way at least as much the lack of time between deadlines.” The Deal.com 03/28/02

Thursday March 28

NO-MAN’S LAND: Are book clubs a women’s domain? “Every time I’ve tried to score a seat in a group, I’ve been blackballed. One of my best friends stared me and my request right in the eyes and burst out laughing. Another acquaintance invited me to join her group, which was suffering from attrition and malaise. I seemed like the perfect solution – until she learned that the club was no-man’s land, literally. But the worst was the time my candidacy made it all the way to a full-group discussion and vote. I lost by a single nay. ‘It was so close,’ said one of my supporters. ‘I think you would have gotten in if you were gay.’ I’m learning to live with rejection.” Salon 03/26/02

LATIN LEGACY: It is one of the great literary paradoxes of the last century that the nations of Latin America could have been plagued by so many vicious dictators and repressive regimes, and yet still produced so many successful and widely-read novelists. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most prolific and well-known, and, like so many of his contemporaries, he has spent his career treading the line between writing and politics. (Llosa even ran for president in his native Peru.) But to him, the spirit of Latin American writing is a special quality that has never been duplicated. The New York Times 03/28/02

Wednesday March 27

LIBRARIANS PROTEST NEW INTERNET CENSORSHIP ROLE: Librarians are protesting a US law that requires libraries to use filtering software on computers. “They want to offer patrons a choice between filtered and unfiltered Internet access, contending that parents and children should be the ones who determine what content they find unacceptable – not the government.” The New York Times (AP) 03/26/02

ALCOTT’S LAST WORK LOOKING FOR A PUBLISHER: Louisa May Alcott’s last work before her death at age 55 was a short story set in China, written as an attempt to gently rein in an unruly niece. The story has never been published without revisions and editings for space. “Now the original version is being offered to publishers with the deleted passages restored and with illustrations by May Alcott Nieriker. The purpose is to raise money for the restoration of Orchard House, the Alcott family home in Concord, [Massachusetts,] where Little Women takes place.” The New York Times 03/27/02

Tuesday March 26

RETHINKING ARTS COVERAGE: The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are in the midst of rethinking their arts coverage. “Should arts coverage be news or feature oriented? Should the emphasis be on ‘high culture’ or pop culture? To what degree should the demands of celebrity journalism be catered to? How should stories that link business to the arts be played?” Not surprisingly, many in the arts are watching with concern. Yahoo! (Reuters) 03/25/02

STIFF UPPER LIPS: German publishing is said to be in disarray. At last week’s Leipzig Book Fair, “the urgency and determination with which publishers tried to exploit Leipzig for all it was worth were so palpable that the atmosphere at the fair was characterized by a strange mixture of defiance and lethargy, by the readiness to discuss and test new concepts in full view of the public as well as by the fear of still more bad news. The fact that most eyes remained glued to the balance sheet and that there was not the slightest evidence of any intellectual aversion to commercialism was as predictable as it was legitimate.”  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/26/02

DUELING LIVES: Biographers are among the age’s ‘most successful literary realtors’, as the poet Geoffrey Hill scornfully puts it, and biography continues to be an expanding genre, feeding the appetite for story left unsatisfied by so much modern fiction, addressing the whole human span, from beginnings to ends. So these tussles to dominate the market – to have a biography become, for a few years at least, the biography of the subject – will continue.” London Evening Standard 03/25/02

EVERYBODY HATES ME: Author Salman Rushdie said in a German interview that he thinks the British press is out to discredit him. “These ambush writers are probably angry that I wasn’t killed. They are holding a grudge against me for surviving the fatwa and that I’m now leading a better life.” BBC 03/26/02

Monday March 25

GOOD YEAR FOR BOOKS: Sales for America’s top three bookstore chains rose 3.7% to $7.51 billion, for the fiscal year ended February 2. Publishers Weekly 03/25/02

ITALY LEAVES BOOKFAIR: Italy officially withdrew from the Paris Book Show after demonstrators showed up protesting Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The fair was to honor the culture of Italy, but Berlusconi’s right-center politics and some of his comments about culture have angered many. Washington Post (AP) 03/25/02

• Previously: ITALY’S CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP: Italy’s big cultural institutions are in political turmoil. Critics charge that the “centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi, which took office nine months ago, seems unable to find the right people to run Italy’s art centres, cultural institutes overseas, or even — and most damagingly — the Venice Film Festival in September.” The Times (UK) 03/20/01

COPYING IN PERSPECTIVE: Just mention of the dreaded “p” word can send a writer’s career into a spin. But “what is ‘plagiarism’? and Why is it reprobated? These are important questions. The label ‘plagiarist’ can ruin a writer, destroy a scholarly career, blast a politician’s chances for election, and cause the expulsion of a student from a college or university.” Yet not all copying or borrowing of someone else’s work is bad. Indeed we want to encourage it. The Atlantic 04/02

Sunday March 24

$$$ AS ATTENTION-GETTER: Canada is justifiably proud of its literary tradition, and has the big-money prizes to prove it. Buckets of ’em, in fact, which begs the question: what good does it do the literary world in general, and struggling but talented young writers in particular, when these large cash awards consistently go to writers who don’t need the money? The truth may be that the only reason the prize money is as big as it is is to get the media to pay attention. Toronto Star 03/23/02

Friday March 22

DOMAIN GRAB THAT DOESN’T RHYME: The UK’s Poetry Society has been running a successful website. But the organization forgot to renew the registration of its domain name www.poetrysoc.com, and “last Thursday, visitors to the society’s website found not poetry but a directory of online service providers offering everything from Viagra pills to hair-loss treatments.” Now the organization “faces a potentially expensive legal fight to get the name back.” BBC 03/21/02 

Thursday March 21

THREE CRITICAL FLAVORS: Literary criticism is an attractive profession – the traits to be a good one are a fuzzy alchemy of skills that are difficult to quantify. Why do Germany’s literary critics currently seem to come in one of three flavors – charlatans, fools or groupies. None is particularly enlightening. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/21/02

WAITING FOR DIVERSITY: “Maybe the most important thing that ever happened in this country for Hispanics wanting to read relevant books was the 2000 census. It said, hey, publishers, there are 35.3 million Latinos out there. So book publishers started to awaken from the somnolence that often embraces them when it comes to the new and started to take notice. Awakened might be too strong a word, but things are slowly changing for Hispanic writers and their audience.” The New York Times 03/21/02

SAVING MALCOLM: “Nearly 40 years after his death, the documentary legacy of Malcolm X is largely scattered and not controlled even by his family. Now that may change. The scare of the auction has sparked a renewed push by Malcolm X’s daughters and the academics allied with them to finally gather, archive and preserve his papers and personal memorabilia.” Washington Post 03/20/02

Tuesday March 19

PROMISE NO PRICE-FIXING: Last summer, the European Commission began investigating several German publishers and book traders, among them the Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House, of price fixing. Now the Commission says if the publishers promise to stop price fixing, they won’t be fined. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/18/02

AUTHORS HATE TO BE USED: In the past year online booksellers have been selling used books right next to their new copies. Within days of a new book being sold online, used copies also start turning up. Authors and publishers – who don’t reap any money from such sales – are feeling abused. Wired 03/19/02

Monday March 18

ONE COUNTRY, ONE BOOK: Maybe New York can’t agree on just one book for everyone to read. But Canada’s CBC thinks it can get the whole country focused on one tome. “A panel of five eminent Canadians select one work of fiction for the country to read together. CBC Radio will broadcast the Canada Reads panel discussion twice daily from April 15 to 19.” National Post 03/15/02

WRITER OF SLIGHT: Thomas Kinkade sells schlocky landscape paintings, “sold in thousands of mall-based franchise galleries nationwide,” and earning “$130 million in sales last year.” “According to Media Arts Group, the publicly traded company that sells Kinkade reproductions and other manifestations of ‘the Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand,’ including furniture and other examples of what the company’s chairman memorably called ‘art-based products,’ his work hangs in one out of every 20 American homes.” Now Kinkade’s “written” a novel, a “shamelessly money-grubbing little bait-and-switch” aesthetically in line with the rest of the Kinkade empire. Salon 03/17/02

Sunday March 17

BIG BAD TORONTO: Every country seems to have one – that city where power and prestige live and where its inhabitants are envied and disliked by the rest of the country. Toronto is Canada’s. “The myths about Toronto publishing and Toronto writers make me laugh. We have all had massive six-figure advances, we all drive Porsches, we all write silly, superficial, gossipy literature, we all actually have no talent, we only get the massive advances because we live in Toronto.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/16/02

Friday March 15

COPY-BUSTER: Student plagiarism has been a thriving industry since the internet made it possible to digitally crib ready-made essays. But new software is becoming an effective cop. “After highlighting instances of replication, or obvious paraphrasing (according to Turnitin, some 30% of submitted papers are ‘less than original’), the computer running the software returns the annotated document to the teacher who originally submitted it—leaving him with the final decision on what is and is not permissible.” The Economist 03/14/02 

Thursday March 14

E-VICTORY: An appeals judge has ruled against Random House in a suit the publisher brought against an e-book publisher. RosettaBooks has been publishing e-versions of books Random House had published as far back as the 1960s. Rosetta says the original publishing contracts only covered print versions and Random House didn’t own electronic rights. The US Appeals Court agrees. Random House vows to continue the case. Wired 03/13/02

CUTTING BACK BOOKS: In a cost-cutting move, the Philadelphia Inquirer has cut its weekly books section from four pages to one. “Sources close to the Inquirer say the book review section was gutted in response to corporate parent Knight Ridder’s demand that the paper immediately reduce annual newsprint costs by $500,000. Reportedly, the Inquirer responded with a counter-offer to reduce newsprint costs by $350,000, which Knight Ridder agreed to.” Philadelphia Weekly 03/13/02

HOW ABOUT DON CHERRY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY? Chicago’s “One Book, One Chicago” project, in which the entire city was encouraged to read the same book at the same time, has spawned a plethora of copycats across the U.S. Now, Canada is going Chicago one better, with a plan to mount a nationwide version of the project. The short list of potential books is out, with the one qualification being that every author considered must be Canadian. National Post (Canada) 03/14/02

Wednesday March 13

THE LATE MR SALINGER: The much anticipated publication of a “new” novella by JD Salinger has been postponed indefinitely. “The novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, was due to be published in November and would have been the first publication from Salinger in 40 years. The small Virginia publisher that Salinger had chosen to release the novella, Orchises Press, say that the book will eventually appear. But there is no new date for publication. The story originally appeared in magazine form in the New Yorker in 1965 and in the 1990s there were plans for a proper publication. An unkind early review in the New York Times is seen as a possible reason for the delay.” The Guardian (UK) 03/13/02

Tuesday March 12

BOOK CIRCLE WINNERS: The National Book Critics Circle announced its annual awards Monday night. At the 27th annual awards ceremony in New York City, the critics honored Austerlitz, a novel by W.G. Sebald, as the best work of fiction. Sebald died in a car crash in December. Double Fold, a book about libraries’ archiving procedures by Nicholson Baker, won for general nonfiction.” The Plain Dearler (Cleveland) 03/12/02

HAMISH HENDERSON, 82: Scottish poet Hamish Hendson has died at the age of 82. “Henderson was, first and last, a poet, and poetry was for them both language rising into song, responsible to moment, people, place and joy. Not for Henderson Auden’s conceit that poetry never made anything happen; he believed that ‘poetry becomes people’ and changes nations, that poetry elevates and gives expression to the deepest and best being of mankind, that poetry is a measure that extends far beyond the written word, that poetry is pleasure and a call to arms.” The Guardian (UK) 03/11/02

Monday March 11

DUBLIN PRIZE FINALISTS: Finalists for the world’s richest literary prize have been announced. “The contenders for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2002 include two Booker prize winners: Peter Carey’s True History Of the Kelly Gang and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” BBC 03/11/02

Sunday March 10

THE COST OF STEALING: Plagiarism isn’t just about the perpetrators. The writers whose work is stolen sometimes made enormous sacrifices to get their research to the page. One historian/writer extensively plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose has spent a career of hardship researching his work for books about World War II. It’s like having your life stolen. Baltimore Sun 03/10/02

• MATHEMATICALLY PLAGIARISTIC: “John L. Casti, a science writer who teaches at the Technical University of Vienna and at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, has been accused of lifting a substantial number of extended passages from other sources in his latest book, “Mathematical Mountaintops: The Five Most Famous Problems of All Time” (Oxford, 2001). Mr. Casti’s book, written for the lay reader, describes mathematicians’ explorations of complicated ideas involving maps, numbers and spaces. But along the way Mr. Casti’s research apparently got a bit out of hand.” The New York Times 03/09/02

Friday March 8

GATSBY IS TOPS: A new survey of top authors, critics, and actors has declared that Jay Gatsby is the greatest literary character of the 20th century, narrowly edging Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye fame. Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert makes the list as well, but, in a stunning snub, Douglas Adams’s Arthur Dent is nowhere to be found. National Post (AP) 03/08/02

GOODWIN HITS BACK: Speaking at a Saint Paul college, embattled historian Doris Kearns Goodwin insisted that her reputation will survive the current plagiarism charges being leveled against her. While admitting that she had made grave mistakes in allowing unattributed passages to make their way into her books, she declared, “I know absolutely that I have dealt fairly and honestly with all my subjects.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 03/08/02

Thursday March 7

ALL PART OF THE (BOOK) DEAL: “In our luminary-fascination society, the book deal is an accouterment to instant or durable celebrity, so reflexive a part of fame that when people see a new name in the news they just know a book is sure to pop up. And usually they are right. With a few notable exceptions, there is little to be said for the value of these books. Still, they have always been one of publishing’s sexiest genres. People apparently are both fascinated and appalled by the large money advances they bring.” The New York Times 03/07/02

DOES IT TAKE A CITY TO READ A BOOK? One novelist doesn’t like the let’s-all-read-the-same-book phenomenon. “Now comes a committee of 21 professional book salesmen and librarians who are going to burst right into my reading life and tell me what to read so I can talk about it with my neighbors. For all its impressive credentials, this campaign is just another form of advertising. [W]hy stop with books? Why don’t the movie professionals prescribe a movie for us to see and the health professionals a diet and the fashion professionals a set of clothes? Why don’t we wear uniforms? Why don’t we all eat the same breakfast?” Newsday 02/06/02

BUT I THOUGHT EVERYONE BOUGHT 17,000 COPIES OF HIS OWN BOOK: David Vise wanted to promote his book. So he went on tour, appeared on TV shows, set up a web site. All the usual stuff. Then he went one step further. “Vise also bought between 16,000 and 18,000 copies of his own book from an online bookseller, Barnesandnoble.com, and then returned most of them in a confusing series of transactions. This unusual tactic has prompted suspicions that he was trying to manipulate bestseller lists by creating phantom sales, which Vise firmly denies.” Washington Post 02/07/02

Wednesday March 6

SPEAKING ABOUT WRITING: There are so many book festivals in Australia now that writers spend a good part of their time speaking about their work. “There are a lot of writers who feel uncomfortable about it, embarrassed that what they have to do is give a performance which is neither related to the writing nor their real self.” The Age (Melbourne) 03/06/02

CHAMPIONING THE UNDERGROUND: Is the literary establishment corrupt, awarding its prizes and grants and favors to one another? The Underground Literary Alliance thinks so. The newly-formed group has been attacking what it considers injustices of the system – writers who are awarded NEA grants and then sit on panels to award other grants, wealthy recipients of awards intended to go to writers who need a basic income so they can write…”It’s a kind of advocacy group to stand up for writers, and the interests of underground writers, number one, but maybe writers in general also. You do have writers organizations out there, but they revolve around writers who don’t need help.” MobyLives 03/05/02

CANADIAN SELF-CONGRATULATION: Canada is famous for its constant hand-wringing over the state of its culture. And who wouldn’t be a bit edgy (and nationalistic) with America right next door oozing its big low-culture butt into your chair every time you turn around? So when a new set of awards for Canadian culture pops up, as seems to happen every couple of minutes, most see it as a good thing. This week, a new slate of literary prizes has been inaugurated in Toronto, and organizers openly tout their belief in Canadian global literary dominance. National Post (CP) 03/06/02

DEGREES OF WRONGNESS: Let’s not lump the plagiarizing transgressions of historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose together. Goodwin “admirably insists that ‘professional standards for historians need never be sacrificed in popular history’ and has conscientiously tried to protect her reputation. Ambrose has in effect conceded that his writing isn’t scholarship—and thus has felt free to shrug off his critics.” Slate 03/05/02

BOOKER WINNER JAILED: “The Booker prize-winning author, Arundhati Roy, has been sentenced to a symbolic one-day prison term and fined 2,000 rupees ($42) after being found guilty of contempt of court. India’s Supreme Court made the ruling in connection with remarks she made about a legal decision to allow work on the controversial Narmada Dam project.” BBC 03/06/02

Tuesday March 5

BEWARE OF TECHNOLOGY: Disney chief Michael Eisner told the Association of American Publishers that technology is one of their biggest threats. “Eisner charged that technologists have been dragging their feet in developing methods to block piracy, while they sell equipment that abets illegally copying. Eisner said that while he favors letting the private sector try to find a solution to illegally copying, the government may need to step in if technology companies do not begin addressing the issue more aggressively.” Publishers Weekly 03/04/02 

THE SECOND GUTENBERG REVOLUTION: Gutenberg’s Bible signaled a revolution in the dissemination of information back in the 16th century. Now it signals another. The Library of Congress, which owns one of three copies of the Bible, has started a project to “photograph, scan and digitize every binding, endsheet and page of the three-volume Bible. ‘We’re hoping to take digital technology as far as it goes and bring this book to life. We hope to make this book more accessible than even Gutenberg did’.” Wired 03/04/02 

Monday March 4

DEFENDING THE SELF-PUBLISHED: Why do so many critics treat self-publishing as if it were the greatest threat to an intelligent society? “The sheer magnitude and intensity of vitriol poured upon those who would dare to enter the holy realm of the published seems totally out of proportion with its object. Self-published books are truly the snuff pornography of the publishing world: universally condemned as crude, exploitative, offensive, and even dangerous, while at the same time rarely if ever seen.” GoodReports 03/03/02

ALTERNATIVE PRESS: Unable to agree on a single book for New Yorkers to read (following the example of several American cities), last week New York got competing everybody-read-the-same-book programs. “The New York Women’s Agenda, a coalition of women’s groups, decided to go its own way and organize an alternative citywide reading program, to be called New York Reads, scheduled for September to coincide with the start of the school year.” Chicago Tribune 03/04/02

GOING AFTER DORIS: As stories in the press mount up about plagiarizing historians, some anonymous tipsters seem to have a particular in for Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It’s hard not to believe there isn’t something sexist about the relentless lambasting Goodwin’s getting,” writes MobyLives’ Dennis Johnson of the anonymous e-mails he’s been getting about Goodwin. MobyLives 03/04/02

Sunday March 3

CENSORSHIP OR EDITING? When a prominent Oxford professor was asked to write a piece on Tony Blair by the London Review of Books, he turned in a piece praising the Prime Minister for his conduct since September 11. Did the magazine kill the piece because editors didn’t like the politics? The Guardian 03/02/02  

Friday March 1

PRESSURE TO PLAGIARIZE: Why are respected historians plagiarizing other people’s work? “There is some truth to the claim that trade publishing has become a harried, assembly-line operation with its head on the block. Only serial blockbusters can stay the ax man’s hand. Thus many books have become as formulaic and shoddy as the flicks that Hollywood churns out. Publishers and writers are desperate to cash in on the latest craze, be it baseball, the founding fathers or jihad. Their livelihoods depend on it.” Los Angeles Times 02/28/02

• AN EXPLANATION (BARELY), NOT AN EXCUSE: “Books are the products of artisans and artists, and this doesn’t allow for them to be mass-produced at their creation like toasters that some assembly line puts together out of these and those parts gathered from here and there. If writers do want to try to run a factory, fine: just as long as they use their own raw materials.” The New York Times 02/28/02

Thursday February 28

READING ALONG: American book sales were flat in 2001. “Following a year that benefited from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, sales in the children’s hardcover segment fell 22.7% in 2001 to $928.6 million. Paperback sales, however, had a second consecutive solid year with sales ahead 17.9% to $887.6 million. In addition to paperback editions of Potter books, segment sales were boosted by tie-ins to the Lord of the Rings movie.” Publishers Weekly 02/26/02

E-BOOKS – NOT QUITE AS DEAD AS WE THOUGHT: “The theme at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers seems left over from the dot-com boom: “Protecting Intellectual Property in the Digital Age.” The recent shutdown of electronic imprints at Random House and AOL Time Warner Inc. makes e-books look like a dying fashion. The e-market continues to expand, nevertheless. While annual numbers for individual publishers remain small – in the tens of thousands of copies sold – Simon & Schuster, St. Martin’s Press, HarperCollins and others report double-digit growth over the past year.” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (AP) 02/27/02

WHY PLAGIARISM MATTERS: Why is so much attention being paid to the plagiarism by historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin? “No one would care about this if Goodwin and Ambrose were obscure assistant professors laboring in some academic backwater. Both, however, are best-selling authors and TV pundits, which is why this literary scandal has generated so many headlines during the past two months. The controversy has touched off a national debate about what constitutes ethical behavior among writers and researchers, especially now that the Internet has made it so easy to copy passages electronically and insert them into a text.” Forbes.com 02/28/02

• MORE AMBROSE: Yet more passages from books by historian Stephen Ambrose are found to have been plagiarized from others. “Several more passages from the historian’s current best seller, The Wild Blue, have been found to closely resemble the works of others, among them the autobiography of former Sen. George McGovern.” Washington Post (AP) 02/28/02
• GOODWIN OFF NEWSHOUR: Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has acknowledged using other writers’ work “without sufficient attribution.” She’s left – or been dropped from – the PBS newshour program. The University of Delaware has cancelled an invitation to speak at commencement. Isn’t that enough punishment? Maybe not. Boston Globe 02/28/02

TOUGH READ: Who knew choosing a book for all New Yorkers to read at the same time would be so tough? “It was working in Seattle, Milwaukee, and California. So why couldn’t it work in New York? How anyone could ever have thought it would work in New York seems a more pertinent question now, as the plan to select a single novel to embody the spirit of the most spectacularly diverse city in America degenerates into arguments and recrimination.” The Guardian (UK) 02/27/02

HIGH COST RETURNS: The Beardstown Ladies investment club claimed high returns and parlayed the club’s wisdom into a publishing juggernaut, selling millions of books. “But claims of a 23.4 percent return on their investments over the 10-year period between 1984-93 turned out to be false. The club revised that number to 9.1 percent — still well below the 15 percent annual return of the overall stock market, with dividends reinvested, over the same period.” Now the first reader lawsuits have been settled, and anyone who can prove they bought the books will get $25 vouchers from the publishers. Yahoo! (AP) 02/26/02

Tuesday February 26

THE WIFE OF BATH, ONLINE THIS SUMMER: The 1476 William Caxton edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is being digitized at the British Library, and will be available on-line late this summer. It was the first book published in English, and only 12 copies are known to remain. The library recently digitized the Gutenberg Bible, which drew a million hits in its first six months; Canterbury Tales is expected to draw even more. The Guardian (UK) 02/26/02

POETRY IN THE PASSING LANE: Editorial writers like to claim, without a lot of evidence, that ‘poetry is on the move.’ They rejoice that Beowulf is a best seller at last. Does this mean that poetry and democracy have come face to face? That poetry is no longer stuck under the thumb of the learned or even the literate? It might. With recent developments in technology; with poems traveling around the world on the Internet without price, tariff, or tax; with cyberwatchers able to encounter a fresh poem every day of the year, selected from new books and magazines, at poems.com, poetry may be gaining lots of customers.” The Atlantic 03/02

I’D LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD TO SING… So what’s wrong with the one city/one book idea where every citizen is encouraged to read the same book? What’s the point of it? The idea seems to promise so many things, like making the world a better place, like peace and understanding … but really – the reality is that the books that are chosen don’t really promote that at all… MobyLives 02/24/02

Monday February 25

GRAND THEFT HISTORY: Last Friday, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin admitted that her plagiarism of material was more extensive than she’d admitted before. Three of her books contain material stolen from others, and her publisher will destroy remaining copies. Why are historians stealing one another’s work? “The apparent epidemic of plagiarism is surely attributable in part to the new style of historical writing – the breezy, informal, anecdote-laden work that can’t bother itself with pesky distractions such as footnotes and proper sourcing.” Chicago Tribune 02/25/02

TOO SOPHISTICATED TO READ TOGETHER? As New York struggles to find a book that the entire city might read, some of the city’s intellectuals have dumped on cities like Chicago that have had success with the one city/one book idea. New Yorkers, they say, are too independent to go for gimmicks that might work in less sophisticated cities (like Chicago). Chicagoans strike back: “They’re missing the point. What we found with our program is that it brought people from so many different backgrounds together.” Chicago Tribune 02/25/02

THE CURSE OF THE VANITY PRESS: Universal publishing might seem to be a good idea, but really… have you seen what people really want to have published? “All that stands between us and this nightmare vision of total authorship is the publishing industry itself, especially the major houses, trading on their power not to publish. By not publishing a lot of tat each year, these giants keep the storytelling hordes at bay.” The Observer (UK) 02/24/02

BURIED IN SLUSH: “Some publishers consider reading slush a waste of resources and no longer accept it; some bribe their assistants to read it by throwing slush-and-pizza parties (presumably figuring that nothing makes cheesy fiction go down easier than a little cheese and pepperoni). My publisher welcomed all slush and handed me the reins. Thus for two years, in addition to fulfilling my normal editorial duties, I hired freelance readers, generated form rejection slips, evaluated the rare promising submission and fielded phone calls from every would-be Frank McCourt with a manuscript in his drawer and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick in his dreams. I wish I could say that serving as a conduit between the publishing elite and the uncorrupted masses taught me valuable lessons in compassion and grace. Instead, it convinced me that the world is full of lunatics.” Salon 02/25/02 

Sunday February 24

YOU MEAN THE ENRON SCANDAL ISN’T FICTION? “Whatever happened to fiction — any fiction — in actual newspapers and magazines? Sure, everyone does some special issue, once a year. But nobody does what the general-interest American magazines do: Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Atlantic and Esquire all run at least one short story, usually a piece of serious literary fiction, every month. No one even attempts it here [in Canada]; even Saturday Night had not had a regular fiction section for years before its demise.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/23/02

HOW GOOD WAS STEINBECK? The debate has raged for decades, from the East-centric halls of Academia to the small towns of the plains. Was John Steinbeck one of the great writers of the last 200 years, or a good-not-great writer of only regional interest? Whichever side you come down on, you’ve probably never considered for a moment that the opposite opinion might be the case. But there are compelling arguments for each conclusion. Dallas Morning News 02/24/02

• BELATED TRIBUTE: At the time it was written, The Grapes of Wrath did not do wonders for John Steinbeck’s image in his California hometown, as the book painted locals as foul-mouthed, abusive extortionists and brutal oppressors of the Okie protagonists. But time heals many wounds, and this month, the 100th anniversary of Steinbeck’s birth will see him honored in the same town that once reviled him. The Age (Melbourne) 02/22/02

Friday February 22

THE SAME READ: Getting everyone in a city to read the same book is an idea that is catching on big time. Why? “In an age of multimedia menus, with 24-hour cable TV and movies on demand, it might seem anachronistic that the low-tech book is occasioning this sudden civic interest. But some believe the surge of popularity for communal reading – not just by cities but also by book clubs and at bookstore events – is a direct response to the essential loneliness of modern life, an antidote to the ‘bowling alone’ syndrome coined by Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam to describe the recent downturn in civic participation.” Los Angeles Times 02/17/02

Thursday February 21

THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY: E-publishing may have slowed with the dot-com bust, but libraries are starting to get into the electronic book business. A library system in California is jumping online. “By clicking on links that are integrated into the library’s own catalog, computer users will be able to read the full text of any book in Ebrary’s database, a collection of about 5,000 titles. The system enables people to search electronically through a book and read its pages on the screen, while ultimately encouraging them to check out a physical copy when they want to read it in full. No option is available for downloading the books to portable devices.” The New York Times 02/21/02

FIXING TO READ ONE BOOK: Did one of the judges choosing a book for the One Book, One New York program – in which everyone is encouraged to read the same book – trade his vote in an Olympic ice dancing-type scandal? Publishers Weekly 02/20/02

Tuesday February 19

WORDS WORDS WORDS: Britain’s poet laureate has written words for a hymn to mark Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee this year. Indeed, the poet laureate writes words for every official occasion. But why? “The whole concept of the poet laureate is completely ridiculous and they shouldn’t have one. When the idea of it started, poets had to have aristocratic and royal patrons in order to survive, but everything is different now. The masses are not interested in what the queen wants anyway, so it’s all a farce. And the forced subjects are bound to make the poetry worse.” The Guardian (UK) 02/19/02

COPYING IS SOMETIMES A VERY GOOD IDEA: The recent exposures of plagiarism by successful writers have obscured an important fact of writing: One good way to develop a style is deliberately to copy someone else’s, as painters do with great works of art. That seems to have been exactly what was going on with The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a nineteenth-century American manuscript which may have been the work of a runaway slave. The New Yorker 02/18/02

THE EMPEROR’S NEW HORROR STORY: So Stephen King says he’s going to retire. Maybe it’s not a bad idea. “King’s retirement may be unlikely, but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea. Truth is, King hasn’t reached the point of recycling; he’s been recycling for years. His fans may not want to admit it, but Stephen King’s most recent books are dull, dreary, repetitive, unoriginal, uninspired hack work. And the best thing – perhaps the only thing – that King can do about it is to stop writing.” Salon 02/19/02

Monday February 18

WHAT PEOPLE READ (HAVE READ): Michael Korda’s new book traces the history of best-selling books over the past century. The lists, he reports, haven’t changed much over the years: “These kinds of books can be easily categorized: dieting, self-help advice (financial or personal), celebrity memoirs, popular fiction, scientific or religious revelations, medical advice (sex, longevity, child-rearing), folksy wisdom, humor, and the Civil War.” But, writes critic Jerome Weeks, if you check the lists carefully, there’s quite a difference in what sells now from what used to sell. Dallas Morning News 02/17/02 

LESS THAN THE MERITS: What is it with authors lately? Caught plagiarizing, they’ve not exactly acted gracefully. Then there’s historian Caleb Carr, who responded to negative reviews with some boneheaded self-promotion. Thing is, some of his complaints may be justified, but the vitriol with which he defended himself negates any sympathy he might have earned. MobyLives 02/18/02

Friday February 15

NEXT HE’LL BE PRAISING MICROSOFT! Critic Johnathan Yardley recently touched a nerve when, in the course of writing a column on the state of bookselling, he dared to posit the heretical notion that the big chain bookstores (Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, etc.) are not only not evil, but actually superior in many ways to small independents. A firestorm of responsible opposing viewpoints has descended, and several of them got together for a little conference-call Yardley-bashing. Holt Uncensored 02/08/02

VICTOR HUGO AT 200: The French (and a lot of other people) are celebrating the 200th birthday of Victor Hugo – not without a bit of ambiguity. The webpage for the Education Ministry, for example, presents him as an exemplar of the values on which the Republic is founded. “This is a risky thing to say about a man who began as a court poet, became the ringleader of the young Romantics, cosied up to three monarchies and managed to be a hero to socialists at the same time.” The Economist 02/14/02

GOOD CITIZENSHIP OR SNEAKY MARKETING? The literary magazine Book has been making strides in the publishing world recently, and the glossy, high-impact look it favors has been attracting attention from some big-money types. But a controversy has arisen over Book‘s newest benefactor, and despite protestations of editorial independence from all sides, some observers are worried that the magazine will soon become little more than a Barnes & Noble promotional tool. Philadelphia Inquirer 02/14/02

Thursday February 14

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN… When police came into one of the largest independent bookstores in the country with a search warrant demanding to know what books a client had bought, the store said no. “Although many people aren’t aware of it, in the eyes of the law buying a book is different from buying a bicycle or a pack of cigarettes. Through the years, the protections accorded materials covered by the First Amendment, such as books and newspapers, have evolved to protect the institutions that provide those materials as well. So when law enforcement officials say they just want information about the books a suspect purchased, booksellers and civil rights advocates see the demand as something that could erode book buyers’ privacy and First Amendment rights.” Salon 02/13/02

IN PRAISE OF SMALL PRESSES: “Everyone knows book publishing is an easy thing to do, just as everyone knows he can run a baseball team or put out a newspaper. The business model for these small houses permits them to produce print runs of 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 copies and still have a chance for profit. Larger houses need minimums of 12,000 or 15,000 copies, virtually eliminating the likelihood that they will take a chance on the experimental. Would one of today’s conglomerate publishing houses be the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses? Not likely.” The New York Times 02/14/02

THE GO-TO GUY OF PLAGIARISM: Thomas Mallon is a distinguished writer in his own right, but people most want to talk to him about plagiarism. That’s because he wrote the book: “We can’t make up our minds just how serious a lapse plagiarism really is. The confusion comes from an aura of naughtiness, a haze that shakes like a giggle: people think of plagiarism as a youthful scrape, something they got caught doing at school. We often, and mistakenly, see plagiarism as a crime of degree, an excess of something legitimate, `imitation’ or `research’ that got out of hand.” Chicago Tribune 02/14/02

STICKY SITUATION: For months someone has been pouring syrup in the book return boxes of Tacoma, Washington-area libraries. The goop has ruined about $10,000 worth of books, videos. Now a 56-year-old man has been arrested. He has a previous record of damaging library books. Yahoo! (AP) 02/13/02

Wednesday February 13

CRITICAL DISCONNECT: Last week author Caleb Carr sent an “enraged” letter to Salon.com complaining about reviews of his book. He “bitterly attacked reviewer Laura Miller and New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, implying that they should stick to writing about ‘bad women’s fiction’.” Not surprisingly, the comments didn’t go well with readers, and now Carr has apologised. “Meanwhile, Amazon.com has pulled Carr’s self-review of Lessons of Terror. The author had given himself the highest rating, five stars, and stated, ‘Several reviews have made claims concerning my credibility that are, quite simply, libelous, and will be dealt with soon’.” Baltimore Sun (AP) 02/13/02

ANOTHER HISTORIAN INVESTIGATED: Emory University is investigating the work of its award-winning historian Michael Bellesiles. Bellesiles “won last year’s prestigious Bancroft Prize, the most coveted award in the field of American history, for his book The Arming of America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. But the book drew intense criticism from researchers who said they could not find the data upon which he said he based his thesis.” Chicago Tribune 02/13/02

Tuesday February 12

THE DISAPPEARING AUSTRALIAN: Only two of Australia’s Top 10 best-selling books last year were Australian. “Interest in Australian writers, it seems, is waning fast, leaving our culture in danger of either being swamped by globally marketed mega-sellers, or disappearing up its own, scarcely regarded, fundament. The figures don’t lie, but perhaps the root of the problem rests not in a lack of interest, nor in disregard for our own history by publishing houses. Perhaps it lies in the practical application of those two awful words: ‘Australian’ and ‘literature’.” The Age (UK) 02/12/02

CLUBBING: It’s a common perception in the book industry that book clubs divert retail sales rather than add new readers. But a new industry study concludes that “the clubs serve as powerful promotional vehicles that stimulate sales through a wide variety of channels.” Publishers Weekly 02/11/02

Monday February 11

NEXT GENERATION LIBRARY: A new Irish library is pulling in the crowds. It was built right next to a busy shopping center, its librarian hands out carnations, and it projects a different tone than traditional temples of books. “Here are the people who have nowhere else to go, people who would go demented sitting at home, people who have a thirst for knowledge and a dearth of funds to satisfy it, people with an inquiry no bookshop could deal with and people relieved, finally, to find a space where they are no longer refugees but library users.” Irish Times 02/07/02

COMMISSION INCREASE: “The largest literary agencies, William Morris and International Creative Management, have both quietly raised the commissions they charge authors to 15 percent of their advance and royalties from 10 percent.” The New York Times 02/10/02

WRITING WITHOUT A NET: There has been a recent rash of publishing “restored” versions of “classic” novels — “novels put back together the way the writer originally had them before some demented editor got his or her filthy hands on them and ruined them.” Wait – it isn’t a bad thing – about that 1200-page dream sequence that was cut… MobyLives 02/11/02

Sunday February 10

THE LIBRARY PROBLEM: Libraries are having difficulty getting people through their doors, as more and more research is done online. “Ironically, although library visits nationwide are on the decline, library resources are being used now more than ever, librarians and students say. The new digital library gives students and faculty 24-hour access to databases and catalogs from nearly anywhere in the world. Users, who can search through years of materials with the click of a mouse, are swamping librarians with e-mailed reference questions.” San Francisco Chronicle 02/10/02

Friday February 8

OF COPYRIGHTS, HOBBITS, AND PARODY: How far do copyrights extend, anyway? Does an author own not only the sequence of words in his/her work, but the characters and events as well? Almost a year after the controversy over a parody sequel to Gone With the Wind, another legal storm is brewing over a companion book to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Coincidentally, Houghton Mifflin, the publisher which defended the Wind parody, is the group suing the author of The Lord of the Rings Diary. Boston Globe 02/07/02

A POEM AS LOVELY AS A… “The Academy of American Poets yesterday named Tree Swenson its executive director, succeeding William Wadsworth, whose departure after a dispute with the organization’s board last fall provoked angry protests from some prominent poets. Ms. Swenson, 50, is the director of programs for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. From 1972 to 1992, she was co-founder, executive director and publisher of Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash., which became an important nonprofit poetry publisher.” The New York Times 02/08/02

GRASS WON’T KEEP OFF THE TABOOS: “German novelist Guenter Grass has broken two national taboos this week, calling for the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and raising the delicate subject of German wartime refugees fleeing from the Red Army. He called for basic information on National Socialism to be made available, and for public discussion of the phenomenon. He said that would help young people who may be fascinated with Nazism, but do not understand the reality behind it.” BBC 02/08/02

Thursday February 7

WON’T YOU BE MY POET… “California’s newly established poet laureate program has run into a problem. Not enough poets – just seven – have thrown their hats into the ring as nominees for the two-year office that was established last year to promote poetry in the state. ‘I wouldn’t say we’re in a panic,’ said Adam Gottlieb, spokesman for the California Arts Council, ‘but we’re close’.” Sacramento Bee 02/06/02

A MATTER OF LANGUAGE: Maxine Kumin could easily rest on her laurels as a Great Writer. But she’s still writing poetry, and still worrying about the new generation of writers. “The thing that’s depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don’t know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line. Many of them don’t know the difference between lie and lay, let alone its and it’s. And they’re in graduate school!” The Atlantic Monthly 02/06/02

DULL OR NOT, THE ESTATE IS WORRIED: “A one-man publishing house has been ordered not to publish – at least for now – his The Lord of the Rings Diary, which puts J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy in chronological order.” In his defense, the author of the book says, “To be honest, Diary makes for dull reading. It isn’t exciting and it isn’t literary and it wasn’t intended to be. It’s like a dictionary, it packages facts about Rings in the most useful possible format.” Washington Post 02/07/02

Wednesday February 6

WANNA READ A GOOD FIGHT? When it comes to slinging words and hurling phrases, lightning adjectival jabs and roundhouse predicates, a roomful (or a pageful) of cantankerous poets is where you’ll find world-class vituperation. Look at what broke out after one poet won the Eliot Prize, and another complained about it. The Guardian (UK) 02/02/02

• Previously: THE DIFFICULT POET: Poet Anne Carson has won most of the major prizes. Yet she has a host of detractors. “Some are afraid of her poetry, condemning it in the most vitriolic terms. Some are afraid of her reputation and will only voice their doubts about her poetry under the mask of anonymity.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/02/02

A NEW E-PUBLISHING PLAN: A company called Chapter-A-Day is trying to hook readers on buying its books by e-mailing them the first parts of a book over several days. For free. But if you get hooked, you’ve got to buy the rest of the book. Some 90,000 people have signed up for the daily installments. And sales are good. Wired 02/05/02

FRANZEN IN 4,934 PAGES: A booklover takes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections with him to Europe as an e-book. Prepared to be skeptical of reading on a little screen (The Corrections measures out in 4,934 pages in e-form) he finds all sorts of advantages to e-reading. Publishers Weekly 01/31/02

SPIKE-BOZZLE? TOO BAD WE LOST THAT ONE: You don’t know what Eurocreep is? How about bed-blocking, or MVVD? Don’t feel bad. They’re brand new words this year; dictionary editors are still trying to figure them out. For comparison, consider words that were new a century ago. Several from the 1902 list are still in use – cryogenic, suitcase, floosie. And several are not, such as spike-bozzle and maffick. The Guardian (UK) 02/04/02

NORMAN MAILER’S LITERARY HEIR: No such animal. “You get very selfish about writing as you get older,” he says. “You’ve got only so much energy and you want to save it for your own work. I’m much more interested in being able to do my own work than bringing a wonderful new writer into existence. Because my feeling is that if he or she is truly a wonderful new writer, they’re going to come into existence on their own.” The Guardian (UK) 02/05/02

Monday February 4

MORE PLAGIARISM: Waht is it with historians. Yet another has been caught up in charges of extensive plagiarizing. Historian Robert M. Bryce has accused the 91-year-old eminent historian Bradford Washburn, the director emeritus of the Boston Science Museum of “lifting vast chunks of text, facts, syntax and even errors from Bryce’s 1997 biography of polar explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook” for a book called The Dishonorable Dr. Cook. Washington Post 02/04/02

Sunday February 3

TO THE AUTHOR WHO STICKS WITH IT: There aren’t many places to publish fiction anymore. That hasn’t stopped people from writing it though – The Atlantic gets about 250 short stories a week submitted by hopeful authors. That works out to one story published for every 1000 sent in. Even if you get rejected though – keep trying. The Atlantic has rejected writers for years before finally publishing them. Those “who just keep writing sooner or later find a workable voice and form, in ways that are unconscious.” Hartford Courant 01/31/02

TOLKIEN RULES CANADIAN PUBLISHING: What was the biggest selling book in Canada last year? Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings series and its prequel, The Hobbit, which sold 1.5 million copies. “That’s more than the combined number of books Canada’s medium-sized publishers sell in a year. A bestselling book in Canada usually accounts for 70,000 copies (a John Grisham or Danielle Steel, for example).” So much for the Canadian book business. Toronto Star 02/02/02

THE DIFFICULT POET: Poet Anne Carson has won most of the major prizes. Yet she has a host of dtractors. “Some are afraid of her poetry, condemning it in the most vitriolic terms. Some are afraid of her reputation and will only voice their doubts about her poetry under the mask of anonymity.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/02/02

Friday February 1

THEY BUY POTTER, BUT THEY BORROW POOH: When Britons go to the library, they go for AA Milne. The author of Winnie the Pooh is the most-borrowed British author, well ahead of JRR Tolkien in second place. Beatrix Potter is in third place, Jane Austen fourth, and Shakespeare fifth. JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series, is in 57th place. The Guardian (UK) 02/01/02

STEPHEN AMBROSE COMES CLEAN. SORT OF: “There are something like six or seven sentences in three or four of my books that are the sentences of other writers. I know they are, and now reporters know they are, and now the whole world knows they are because I put footnotes behind those sentences and cited where I got this from. What I had failed to do – and this was my fault, my mistake – was to put quotation marks around those six or seven sentences.” Washington Post 02/01/02

• THE COMPUTER MADE ME DO IT: You might think electronic data banks and sophisticated word processing programs and instant Internet access would simplify research, making it ever easier to keep track of who wrote what. But no. Computers apparently complicate the matter of attribution. Then there are the demands of publishers and, oh, lots of things. What’s a poor writer to do? One answer: “When in doubt, throw a couple of quotes around it. Slap on a footnote.” Christian Science Monitor 01/31/02

POUNDING OUT A DAILY 5000 WORDS: Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his reputation has gone steadily downhill since. A new biography may partially rehabilitate him: “Lewis’s foremost virtue comes across as his brute industry: he was heroically able to rise, in whatever unhomey shelter his wanderlust had brought him to, through whatever grisly thickness of hangover, and go to his typewriter and pound out his daily five thousand words.” The New Yorker 02/04/02

Thursday January 31

STICKING TO THE TRAIL: How to have a successful career as a writer? Novelist/playwright Michael Frayn says: “The only advice that I could think of giving to a young writer is to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it. Very simply, people want reliability and continuity in a writer. If you buy cornflakes you want cornflakes.” The Guardian (UK) 01/31/02

ANTI-THEFT: After the rash of high profile authors recently caught plagiarizing, one critic wonders how to stop plagiarism. Shame, that’s how. Letting authors make financial settlements with those they have stolen from doesn’t help the reader. Slate 01/30/02

THE OFFICIAL POET “The official poet laureate, appointed by the British royal family for over 300 years and rewarded with a ‘butt of canary wine, to be paid annually,’ is an object of mild scorn for literary skeptics and antimonarchists alike. But at a time when published opinion is much regulated by professional spin doctors, this institution can be used to promote a reexamination of the role played by poets and poetry in public life.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/31/02

MAKE IT STOP: “Another complaint against Stephen Ambrose has emerged. This one dates back to 1970, when fellow historian Cornelius Ryan accused him of a ‘rather graceless falsification’ in Ambrose’s book, The Supreme Commander. The allegations were first reported Tuesday on Forbes.com.” The Plain Dealer (AP) 01/31/02

SOME VERY UNPOETIC SOUR GRAPES: “Winning the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize last week has confirmed Anne Carson’s status as one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary poets. Soon after the prize was announced, Carson, who teaches classics at McGill University in Montreal, was denounced in Britain’s Guardian newspaper by eminent poetry critic Robert Potts for writing ‘doggerel’ that mixes ‘an occasional (and occasionally cliched) lyricism, some fashionable philosophizing and an almost artless grafting-on of academic materials.'” National Post (Canada) 01/31/02

Wednesday January 30

STEPHEN KING SAYS NO MORE NOVELS: Stephen King has a new novel coming out. So what? He publishes so many books in a year that he even made up a pseudonym so publishers could handle the overflow. So it may be his last. “You get to a point where you … basically recycle stuff,” he says. “I’ve seen it in my own work. People when they read Buick Eight are going to think Christine. It’s about a car that’s not normal, OK?” A couple more projects, “Then that’s it. I’m done. Done writing books.” CNN 01/29/02

Tuesday January 29

LITERARY NOMINATIONS: The National Book Critics Circle announces its award nominees. Heading up the fiction list is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Other nominees include WG Sebald’s Austerlitz, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, and Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Evidently Franzen’s dustup with Oprah earlier this winter hasn’t hurt The Corrections. The book already won the National Book Award, and sales have almost reached the 1 million mark – an impressive number for a work of literary fiction. Nando Times (AP) 01/28/02

PLAGIARISM AND TECHNOLOGY: In the last month, two prominent American historians have faced charges of plagiarism, and lately, it seems that not a month goes by without some well-known author or other standing accused. It’s not that the problem of plagiarism has become appreciably more widespread than it used to be – it’s that new computer programs can compare texts far more efficiently than ever before. San Francisco Chronicle 01/29/02

STANDARDS OF FAIRNESS: A new copyright law has been passed in Germany that mandates that publishers must pay freelance writers a “fair” compensation that is “standard in the trade.” The big question is how this will be enacted. What is fair? and if “standard” practice is unreasonably low, will it be fair? Perhaps predictably, publishers are unhappy with the new law. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/29/02

PIPPI LONGSTOCKING CREATOR DIES: Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish writer whose ‘Pippi Longstocking’ books won the hearts of children and adults the world over, has died at her home in Stockholm at the age of 94. “Lindgren’s works were translated into dozens of languages, ranging from Azerbaijani to Zulu, and sold more than 130 million copies worldwide.” Dallas Morning News (AP) 01/28/02 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday January 28

LISTEN UP: MP3 books are becoming popular – whole books can be downloaded onto tiny devices that can be reloaded over and over again. The format is especially popular with “with commuters, foreign students learning English and the visually impaired.” The Independent (UK) 01/26/02

IT’S NOT PLAGIARISM, IT’S A TRIBUTE: Olaf Olafsson is “vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media, father of the Sony PlayStation and an acclaimed novelist.” But his latest book contains numerous passages stolen word for word from “the late, great Bay Area food writer M.F.K. Fisher.” Contacted about the copying, Olafsson says what he did wasn’t copy but pay “tribute.” He says that “readers familiar with Fisher, who died in 1992, will recognize the borrowed passages and understand he’s paying homage.” Siliconvalley.com 01/27/02

HOW/WHY TO READ: Who needs a book to tell them how to read? “Professorial how-to-read books have always struck me as eminently avoidable, in part because such lamentations are wearisome, even if not altogether untrue. If the lay reader knows enough to know that she needs to pick up a book on reading, why must her self-knowledge be met with a harangue against philistinism? Besides, all criticism teaches us how to read; literary essays instruct best when they are not overtly instructive. Or so I thought.” The New York Times 01/27/02

THE AUTHOR, NOT THE PERSON: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis canceled his book tour last week. Last year it was revealed that Ellis had lied about having served in Vietnam during the war, and Ellis was sure to be questioned about this on the tour. In Seattle, there have also been objections to Ellis speaking at an author series at the Seattle Public Library. But hosts of the event have decided to go ahead with the appearance in February. “It seemed to us that Ellis’ personal life – what he did or didn’t do as a teacher – really has nothing to do with the scholarship that went into his books about Jefferson and the founding brothers.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 01/28/02

Sunday January 27

RENOVATING OUT THE LIBRARY EXPERIENCE: The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has a great collection. It recently reopened after an extensive renovation. “But — a sign of the times? — the research division is no longer a pleasurable place in which to read a book or listen to a recording.” The New York Times 01/27/02

Friday January 25

CALL IT BURNSDAY: Today’s the birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns (he’d be 243), and in his home, “Fuelled by haggis and whisky, revellers recite Rabbie’s verses in celebration of his life, work and love of Scotland.” Find out how much you know about Scottish writers (including at least one of the awful ones). The Guardian (UK) 01/25/02

THE BEST BOOK REVIEW? “The Times Literary Supplement – known universally as the TLS – is a hundred years old this month. From its first densely printed, eight-page edition of Jan. 17, 1902, to its special bumper 48-page centenary issue currently on newsstands, it has carved out a unique position in the world of papers and journals as the reviewer of all that is best and most important in new books, from novels and poetry to academic studies and biographies.” Los Angeles Times 01/24/02

E-TEXTS: University presses and libraries at 12 American universities have teamed up on an e-publishing plan for scholarly books. ” The hope is that university presses in the consortium might one day offer all of their books in electronic form in a version that could be linked to a joint online library catalog that the group already operates. It could quickly become be a sizable collection: The university presses publish about 1,000 new books each year.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/24/02

TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE: The poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that “exile is the worst fate that may befall a poet, since poetry cannot live without its roots in native speech,” and another poet, Robert Frost, wrote that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Still, translators continue trying to wrestle the poetry of one language into another, and sometimes bring it off. The Economist 01/24/02

Thursday January 24

WHO’S “BORROWING” FROM WHOM? The issue of plagiarism is more complex than black-and-white. “On the one hand, formal rules against plagiarism grow ever more abundant and ever more stringent (even if no more original), and Op-Ed columnists wax furious in their condemnation of plagiarism by public officials. On the other hand, many Op-Ed columns are written by individuals other than the one whose name appears on the byline, and for that matter many newspaper stories are more-or-less verbatim versions of press releases sent out by political organizations, trade associations, or other interest groups.” The Idler 01/23/02

AND THIS AFFECTS LAW ENFORCEMENT HOW? Okay, follow closely: The police department of Penryn, Pennsylvania, is boycotting this year’s YMCA triathlon, refusing to direct traffic and stand around looking important. Why? The YMCA apparently reads Harry Potter books to children. So? Well, the wee wizard is all satanic and stuff, y’know. Nando Times (AP) 01/24/02

Wednesday January 23

BLACK HOLES: “Six months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that publishers don’t own the rights to online freelance articles. The publishers have responded by purging freelance articles – sometimes entire newspaper archives – from online databases. Almost 20 years’ worth of newspaper history, a vital source of information for those studying history, politics, society, the media, and other subjects, is shot through with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. Scholars worry that they might find holes in their research. No one in academe seems to know how many articles, and which ones, are missing from the databases. After all, online databases, with their ethereal form, aren’t like broadsheets of newsprint – you can’t open them like you would a morning paper and see the holes cut out.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/21/02

GOODWIN CHARGED WITH COPYING: Now it’s historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s turn to be accused of plagiarism. A letter to The Weekly Standard (the publication which revealed historian Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism two weeks ago) pointed out that “Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys borrowed with insufficient attribution from three earlier works by other authors.” The magazine’s “examination of the works in question confirmed the correspondent’s allegation.” The Weekly Standard 01/28/02

• BY WAY OF EXPLANATION: ”All that really happened was she sent me a letter saying not all the passages that relied on her work had been as fully footnoted as she would have liked,” said Goodwin. ”I agreed with her.” A monetary settlement was paid. Boston Globe 01/22/02
• WHAT’S THE STANDARD? “Goodwin has not only committed plagiarism, but lied about whether it was plagiarism (and, incidentally, paid hush money to one of the people she plagiarized).” Slate 01/22/02
• A SIMPLE TRUTH: Whew – it’s tough to defend those who “borrowed” the words of others without the proper credit. But the principle stands: “If you didn’t write it, you need to put quote marks around it. It really is that simple.” MobyLives 01/22/02

THE TRADITION OF POETRY IN ARABIA: “Poets from all over Arabia would recite their poems in front of judges. Each year the festival’s winning poem would be transcribed in golden letters and hung on the door of Ka’bah in Mecca for the whole year. It was like the Nobel Prize of ancient Arabia. In every Arab country every day, poets appear on television, on the radio, or in the newspaper. Every single newspaper in the Arab world every day has poetry. Poetry is the essence of Arab culture.” Humanities January-February 2002

NOVELS – AND NOVELISTS – BURIED IN THE PAST: What’s happened to our novelists lately? They’re so busy robbing the grave, as it were – writing about characters from the past, instead of focusing on our present world. And the problem seems to be worst of all in Australia. The Age (Melbourne) 01/21/02

Tuesday January 22

CANADIAN WINS ELIOT PRIZE: “Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been named the winner of the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for 2001. Ms Carson’s ‘poignant’ and ‘unique’ collection The Beauty of the Husband was the best work of new poetry published in the UK and Ireland last year, a panel of poets has decided.” BBC 01/21/02

KIDS’ CORNER: “The story of an orphan living under a bridge in 12th century Korea won top honors in children’s literature Monday from the American Library Association. “A Single Shard,” by Linda Sue Park, won the Newbery Medal, awarded annually to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children… David Wiesner, illustrator and author of “The Three Pigs,” won the Randolph Caldecott Medal, awarded each year to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.” Orlando Sentinel 01/21/02

THE CLASSICS, ONLINE: “Project Gutenberg, named after the inventor of the printing press, Johann Gutenberg, is an online, worldwide database of books in electronic form – and it’s free. Since 1971, volunteers have transposed or scanned more than 4000 books on to the US site.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/22/02

• SPEAKING OF GUTENBERG: Not much is known about the life of the man who invented the printing press. “It is unclear exactly when Gutenberg was born, how he was schooled or whether he married. The date of his death, 1468, is known only from an uncorroborated note casually scribbled by an acquaintance on a printed book’s flyleaf. The circumstances under which he arrived at his two most important ideas – the notion of movable type itself and the hand-mould technology needed for the rapid mass-casting of the letters – have gone unrecorded.” Financial Times 01/22/02

HOW TO CREATE AWKWARDNESS: Few things in life are as deadly as a close friend’s book recommendation. The enjoyment of literature is an intensely personal activity, and one person’s life-changing page-turner may be another’s deadly bore. And the walls of friendship come tumbling down… National Post (Canada) 01/22/02

Monday January 21

STUCK IN THE PAST: Why are so many of Australia’s best contemporary novels set in the past? It’s the rare story that reflects life that is familiar to us today. Is it that “we’re not the most powerful nation on earth and so do not find, like the Americans do, power and significance dwelling in our most ordinary things?” The Age (Melbourne) 01/21/02

SO WHAT’S A LITTLE PLAGIARISM…: Historian Stephen Ambrose may be scorned for his plagiarism revealed in the past few weeks. But in his hometown of New Orleans, few seem to care. The Times-Picayune wrote in an editorial Jan. 11: “He has been ‘a great friend to this community … No one wants to see Mr. Ambrose’s numerous achievements diminished by the present allegations.” Others wonder: “So what if he plagiarized? Everyone plagiarizes to some extent. He has raised awareness of history among a whole new population of Americans.” Nando Times (AP) 01/21/02

Sunday January 20

TO CATCH A PLAGIARIST: Why did it take so long for historian-plagiarist Stephen Ambrose to get caught? More importantly, why did it take a conservative magazine editor to expose the wrongdoing of one of right-wing America’s biggest intellectual apologists? “Could it be that the left is too indifferent to American military history to bother catching one of its best-selling mythologizers with his pants down? Or does resentment of blockbuster book sales cut across party lines, afflicting conservatism’s detractors and its supporters alike with touching bipartisanship?” San Francisco Chronicle 01/19/02

THE WORST SEX EVER: “Writing a sex scene with authenticity of emotion is the literary equivalent to the struggle visual artists have in painting hands and feet. As with the act itself, performance anxiety can lead to overwriting in an author who is trying too hard, or limpness in a writer unable to rise above self-consciousness.” Herein, the best examples of such literary impotence, as judged by a panel of Canadian publishers, and featuring such gems as “Ride my stallion, Morag.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/19/02

Friday January 18

MORE AMBROSE: Yet another book has been added to the Stephen Ambrose plagiarism list. “Despite Ambrose’s continued dominance of the bestseller lists, 2002 is shaping up as a year to forget for America’s favorite celebrity historian. He apologized immediately for not putting quotation marks around the purloined Wild Blue passages; since then, as the other five books have been identified one or two at a time, he generally has declined to comment.” Forbes.com 01/17/02

• CAREER EFFECT? Some book world people doubt that publicity about Ambrose’s plagiarism, though embarrassing for Ambrose, would hurt sales of his bestselling history books. Indeed, it “might actually end up boosting sales by attracting more attention to his books. In any case, the best-selling historian will remain a hot literary property. ‘Any agent or publisher would be glad to grab him’.” Forbes.com 01/11/02

PLAGIARISM, CHINESE EDITION: Wang Mingming, an elite professor at Beijing University, and credited in China with reviving interest in sociology, has been “accused of using parts of a 1987 edition of Cultural Anthropology, a widely used textbook by William A. Haviland of the University of Vermont, in his own 1998 book. Wang translated Haviland’s book into Chinese in 1987 with his permission. The official Xinhua News Agency says Wang has been stripped of his teaching posts.” Nando Times (AP) 01/17/02

S’BETTER TO LOOK GOOD? “Why are so many people paying hard-earned cash for books they can barely begin to understand? Part of the answer, surely, is vanity. A Hawking or Greene sitting on the coffee table–preferably with a few pages conspicuously bent back at the corners–sends a powerful message to visiting friends, prospective dates, and (above all) to oneself, that an intellect is present in the house. Whether or not you read them, possession alone looks good. Intellectual vanity is as potent a force as the sartorial variety.” Los Angeles Times 01/13/02

MAKING RARE BOOKS ACCESSIBLE: “Octavo Corp. and its staff of eight have revolutionized the conservation and accessibility of rare books, using technology in the service of history. This month they’re starting work on the most famous book in the U.S., the Library of Congress’ pristine copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Through a combination of hardware – lights, cameras, and a lot of servers – and software, the company produces digital reproductions of rare books, which it then sells to consumers.” SFWeekly 01/17/02

Thursday January 17

ART OF THE NOVEL: There’s been a rash of novels lately in which writers have found the inspiration for their story, or their characters, in famous (or not-so-famous) paintings. “For a writer, an intriguing picture hot-wires the storytelling engine. Before committing word one to paper, you already know the time, place and setting. You not only see what your main character looks like, you know her class.” Washington Post 01/17/02

CHILDERS ON AMBROSE: Historian Thomas Childers speaks out on Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism of his work: “I was surprised and disappointed. I was bewildered, at first, as to how he would have the chutzpah to do this. He didn’t have to do this, and I wasn’t flattered. My wife, Kristin, was angry enough for the both of us.” But Childers decided to say nothing: “Do I really want to be the scholarly guy rapping the famous guy on the knuckles in a schoolmarmish way?” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/16/02

• GETTING IT VERY WRONG: World War II vets aren’t as upset about the copying as they are about all the mistakes about the war in Ambrose’s books. “The real problem is that Ambrose gets key things about World War II wrong all by himself. That Ambrose, America’s most popular war historian, has published eight books in five years is seen by them as not so much an excuse for the alleged errors as the reason.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/15/02

NOBELIST CAMILO CELA, 85: “Spanish writer Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for literature, has died in Madrid from respiratory and coronary failure. With his first novel, published in 1946, Cela became a leader of a straightforward style of writing, called tremendismo, which clashed with the lyricism that had characterised writers of the previous generation in Spain.” BBC 01/17/02

Wednesday January 16

WHY STEALING’S ALWAYS BAD: Historian Stephen Ambrose has been caught plagiarizing in at least four of his books. This is a very serious offense, so it’s off to the penalty box for him. The media has made a big deal of this, but historians haven’t condemned him with the vehemence one would expect. Why? Several reasons, but “a comparison of the Ambrose and Monaghan books found that, despite picking up sentences here and there, Ambrose wasn’t wedded to Monaghan’s work. He had synthesized material from many sources and was producing his own version of Custer’s life.” Chicago Tribune 01/16/02

THE PROBLEM BEQUEST: A small library in Massachusetts gets a million-dollar bequest from a letter carrier who died in 1940 to buy books. But the library is stuffed full and has no room to put any new volumes. What it really needs is to expand – but should the terms of the bequest be broken? National Post (AP) 01/16/02

Tuesday January 15

STARTING OVER: “In late September, Phyllis Grann shocked the book world by announcing she would leave Penguin Putnam, the $750 million publishing empire she assembled over 25 years and could not have dominated more completely if her name were on the building. Most executives with her career would have simply retired. She was the first woman CEO in publishing, and the head of an imprint that’s reputed to be 50 percent more profitable than any of its peers. Instead of bowing out, however, Grann trotted out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crack about American lives’ having no second acts, vowed to have one of her own, then sat back to watch the frenzy of speculation about her next move.” Then she joined Random House. New York Magazine 01/14/02

LARKIN’S MONEY GOES TO CHURCH: Poet Philip Larkin, who “declined the poet laureateship a year before he died in 1985, remains best known for his reverently agnostic poem Churchgoing. He also said: ‘The Bible is a load of balls of course – but very beautiful’.” So his friends and fans were amused recently when £1 million of his legacy was willed to the Church of England. The Guardian (UK) 01/12/02

Monday January 14

WHY PLAGIARISM MATTERS: The charges of plagiarism are mounting against historian Stephen Ambrose. ” Ambrose’s patriots can’t fall back on the factory defense anymore: Two of the cases occurred when Ambrose was an obscure professor, before he became Stephen Ambrose Industries. Ambrose is more defiant than apologetic. Ambrose’s assertion that he’s not a thief is ludicrous. One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology. You can bet that historians jealous of Ambrose (that is, all historians) are this minute combing the rest of his corpus for more evidence of sticky fingers.” Slate 01/11/02

AND THE BOOK BUSINESS IS INTELLECTUAL, RIGHT? Lest anyone forget, the book business is run by individuals – people who can be as petty, self-serving, obtuse and wrong-headed as the rest of us. MobyLives nominates 2001’s most misguided figures. MobyLives 01/14/02

WHAT’S LEFT OVER: Most books at some point get remaindered. “The common misconception is that remainders are ‘bad’ books. Some may be, but the reality is almost every author – Booker and Giller winners, and names like Atwood and Urquhart – have titles that have been thrown into the bins. And they’re the gems that voracious readers eagerly forage for.Remainders are an important part of our business, accounting for at least 10 per cent of overall sales ” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/11/02

A LESSON IN HUMILITY: “To write The Best Book Ever Written is not a ridiculous aspiration. Ridiculous would be to aspire to write a ‘flawed, two-dimensional and structurally awkward’ novel. ‘Pretentious twaddle’ is not the kind of star to which a wagon can be very usefully hitched. Mid-list leaves something to be desired as a career goal. There is much to be gained by setting out to write The Best Book Ever Written, not the least of which is that once every millennium, somebody might actually do it. However, as commendable as it is to aim high, and as useful a motivator as unreasonable ambition may prove to be, the kind of literary pride that makes writers think that readers will drop everything to read them is rarely helpful once a book is published. For all but the rare exceptions, publication is a crash course in humility.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/11/02

Sunday January 13

THE WANDERING PRIZE: “In the starry firmament of literary prizes, from the distant twinkling of Somerset Maugham to the intergalactic majesty of Orange, to the autumn brilliance of Booker, Whitbread is the wandering planet: wreathed in vapour, beyond radio contact and thrillingly weird, the object of fascinated annual terrestrial speculation.” The Observer (UK) 01/13/02

PUTTING MARK TWAIN IN HIS PLACE: Was Mark Twain America’s greatest writer? Ken Burns’ new documentary forces the question. “Here’s a guy who wrote such classics as Tom Sawyer, such politically charged novels as Pudd’nhead Wilson and such eye-opening travelogues as The Innocents Abroad. He also had the kind of grand tragedies in his personal life that we expect from great writers: losing loved ones at a young age, going broke by investing in one silly invention after another, struggling with clinical depression. But there’s a problem in putting Twain at the head of the class. He was funny. Too funny.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 01/13/02

Friday January 11

AMBROSE – TOO PROLIFIC TO BE ORIGINAL? As accusations about plagiarism mount against popular historian/author Stephen Ambrose, checking out Ambrose’s books has become a cottage industry. He’s written a lot of books – too many too quickly, say some critics, to be reliable. “In seven years, Ambrose has published nine books of history, plus the eighth edition of a co-authored survey of American foreign policy. In the last two years alone, he’s published four books, including The Wild Blue and Nothing Like It in the World. Many of his books have become bestsellers.” Washington Post 01/11/02

THE HALLMARK POET: Poet Maya Angelou has a new job – writing greeting cards for Hallmark. “If I’m America’s poet, or one of them, then I want to be in people’s hands. All people’s hands, people who would never buy a book.” Some samples? “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.” Or how about: “The wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy, the wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.” USAToday 01/10/02

BOOKS ON THE HALF SHELL: You see them everywhere now, these little half-efforts meant to be taken in during a pedicure or while in a holding pattern over Providence, from The One Minute Manager (111 pages, $20) to Who Moved My Cheese? – 77 glorious pages for $19.95. There is also the very successful Penguin Lives series, which allows the reader to congratulate him- or herself on having read a biography of Woodrow Wilson when in reality the mark has absorbed a lovely, but brief, essay by Louis Auchincloss and paid $20 for the privilege.” Boston Globe 01/10/02

AND ‘TWAS EVER THUS: James Boswell, perhaps the best-known-ever biographer, was “a rash and impulsive soul, easily foxed, fuzzy-brained, vastly bipolar and a martyr to booze, gambling and rabid fornication.” On a winter evening in 1774, he noted in his diary, “Much intoxicated. Found myself bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. Could not stop but when I came to the bottom of it, fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much.” So he went home to write. The Irish Times 01/08/02

Thursday January 10

THOSE OTHER SHOES KEEP DROPPING: Poor Stephen Ambrose. People keep accusing him of lifting material from other sources for his own books, but not giving credit. Charges three and four complain that his book, “Citizen Soldier, and Part 3 of his Richard Nixon trilogy, contain passages similar to those in other texts.” Ambrose was reported to be unsure whether any of his other books – he’s published more than 20 – have similar problems. Washington Post 01/10/02

• Previously: MORE AMBROSE ALLEGATIONS: “A second book by best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose is being cited for having material that was allegedly copied from another text. Forbes.com is reporting that Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer contains sections similar to Jay Monaghan’s Custer. A representative for Ambrose said Tuesday there would be no immediate comment. Anchor Books, which publishes the paperback edition of Crazy Horse and Custer, also declined immediate comment.” Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/09/02

NY’S DISAPPEARING BOOKSTORES: What’s happening to Manhattan’s independent book stores? They’re closing, that’s what. “Whatever the factors—rent spikes, chain domination, reading-allergic citizenry, publishers’ high price tags—it was hard for a bookstore lover not to notice all the closings in 2001.” Village Voice 01/09/02

IN THE CROSSHAIRS: “Biography is not a pretty business, and biographers, by and large, are a devious, unscrupulous bunch. I would not trust any of us, were I unlucky enough to be the hunted rather than the hunter.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/10/02

Wednesday January 9

LIBRARIANS TO THE RESCUE: Publisher HarperCollins was ready to pulp Michael Moore’s new book for its criticisms of George Bush (among other things) and never release it. But a librarian heard about Moore’s plight and rallied other librarians to the cause, and now the book is finally getting into stores. Salon 01/07/02

MOVEABLE SLUSH PILE: Publishers are inundated with thousands of manuscripts each year. Of those, only a few ever see their way into print. More and more the onus on filtering out manuscripts is falling not on publishers but on agents. “Formerly, writers toiled in garrets and sent their work to publishers, who eventually gave the thumbs up or down. As publishers’ resources have shrunk and been redirected, they have abdicated that crucial gatekeeper’s task to others: agents, mainly, a small number of award judges, and manuscript assessment services.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/09/02

HECK, JUST READ ‘EM ALL: Last year, the Chicago Public Library initiated a campaign to get everyone in the city (a good percentage of them, anyway) to read the same book over the same summer in order to promote reading and literature in general. The book was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Now, it’s time to select a book for the second year of the program, and public response could not be more enthusiastic. And therein lies the problem – no one can agree on one book. Chicago Tribune 01/09/02

MORE AMBROSE ALLEGATIONS: “A second book by best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose is being cited for having material that was allegedly copied from another text. Forbes.com is reporting that Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer contains sections similar to Jay Monaghan’s Custer. A representative for Ambrose said Tuesday there would be no immediate comment. Anchor Books, which publishes the paperback edition of Crazy Horse and Custer, also declined immediate comment.” Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/09/02

Tuesday January 8

A SUBJECTIVE CRIME: Plagiarism has always been hard to define, and the case of Stephen Ambrose emphasizes the point. Ambrose reprinted unattributed passages from another book in his latest tome, for which he has apologized. But the New York Times reprinted nearly verbatim the allegations against Ambrose from the magazine they first appeared in, also without attribution. Is that plagiarism? Does context matter? And for good measure, is Ambrose’s apology and promise to correct later editions even remotely enough to make things right? Philadelphia Inquirer 01/08/02

NEWSFLASH – PEOPLE LIKE THEIR BOOKS TO INCLUDE PAPER: It would be nice to say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, but in truth, the “e-books” phenomenon has been one of the economic downturn’s most predictable casualties. Dozens of companies, from global publishers to internet-based startups, leaped into the e-book fray a couple of years ago, with all the usual pronouncements about how the new tehnology would change everything about the way we read. These days, the small companies are gone, the big ones are downsizing, and e-books are considered a vast money pit. Publishers Weekly 01/07/02

THE SLUR THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: “Regardless of spelling, pronunciation, or intention, arguably no word in the American lexicon conjures more incendiary emotion and history than ‘nigger.’ Considered so barbed and venomous it is widely referred to as ‘the n-word,’ in many corners uttering its two syllables aloud is tantamount to yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Still, it’s the only title Randall Kennedy considered for his latest book. Both informative and infuriating, ‘Nigger’ is an anatomy of an epithet, which, through four centuries, has lost none of its potency to enrage and fuel fierce debate.” Boston Globe 01/08/02

Monday January 7

AMBROSE ADMITS COPYING WORK: Over the weekend Stephen Ambrose admitted lifting passages from Thomas Childers’ book for his best-selling history of World War II The Wild Blue. “I made a mistake for which I am sorry. It will be corrected in future editions of the book.” The New York Times 01/06/02

• DID HISTORIAN AMBROSE STEAL SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK? Stephen Ambrose is “perhaps America’s most popular historian and one of its most prolific.” His most recent book, climbing the New York Times’ Bestseller list, focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II. Weedkly Standard columnist Fred Barnes contends Ambrose copied passages of the book from a 1995 book by Thomas Childers. Weekly Standard 01/04/02
• THE CASE AGAINST AMBROSE: “In an interview, Professor Childers, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said he, too, had concluded that Mr. Ambrose borrowed excessively. ‘I felt sort of disappointed,’ he said.” The New York Times 01/05/02

Sunday January 6

CLUES TO THE FRENCH MIND: A French poll listing of the 50 greatest books of the 20th Century says some important things about the French. First, about half of the books on the list aren’t French. Second – none of the English books were written before World War II. And there are no important contemporary American authors represented. “They still have a rather Francophone understanding of English and American literature. As nothing, of course, to American and British parochialism in respect of foreign literature. But also I detect a kind of eagerness to be part of a wider world. Many French people think that France must engage more fully with the outside world: they are alarmed that the Anglophone world is leaving them behind. This world of hundreds of millions of English speakers seems in its unstoppable immensity to them to be consigning France to a sort of museum culture.” The Guardian (UK) 01/05/02

Friday January 4SURPRISE WHITBREAD WINNER: “Patrick Neate has won the Whitbread novel award with his second book, Twelve Bar Blues, beating strong favourite Ian McEwan. The surprise winner receives £5,000 in prize money and goes on to compete for the Whitbread Book of the Year – worth £25,000 – alongside the other Whitbread winners and the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year.” BBC 01/04/02

• NEATE SURPRISE: “When my book was published it did not make the barest ripple on the surface of the nation’s literature, so to win an award beating Ian McEwan and Helen Dunmore is just absurd.” BBC 01/04/02

BULLISH ON PUBLISHING: The Dow Jones might have had an off year in 2001 (the index fell 7.1 percent), but publishing companies did well with their stock prices. The Publishers Weekly index tracking stock prices of 22 publishing companies rose by 10.3 percent. Book manufacturers and book retailers had a very strong year while e-publishing struggled. Publishers Weekly 01/02/02

POETIC PALLOR: What’s going on with the American Academy of Poets? Last fall it laid off employees and fired William Wadsworth, its longtime director. “During Wadsworth’s 12-year tenure, the Academy launched an array of new programs: National Poetry Month; the Poetry Book Club; a Web site; and the Online Poetry Classroom, which encourages poetry education in secondary schools. Wadsworth also oversaw the addition of five awards to the Academy’s distinguished series, as well as the establishment of the Atlas/Greenwall Fund, which provides support to noncommercial poetry publishers. Under Wadsworth’s leadership the Academy’s annual income increased from $400,000 to $3 million, and its total assets grew from $2 million to $10 million.” Poets & Writers 01/02

Thursday January 3

MUGGLES GOT NO SENSE OF HUMOR: Time was when a cultural phenomenon knew it had hit the big time when a parody showed up in Mad Magazine. These days, the modern equivalent seems to be when some aspiring satirist finds his/her work shot down in court, or declined by publishers fearful of the wrath of their corporate peers. A Harry Potter parody is the latest victim of the publishing/merchandising brand-protection conspiracy, and its author is not happy. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/02/02

COWBOY COUPLETS: It gets lonely out there on the prairie, ridin’ the range with nothin’ but the tumbleweed and the herd to keep you company on those long, cold, Midwest nights. At least we assume it does: how else to explain the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, going on this month in Elko, Nevada? “Started 18 years ago, the annual event, which now lasts a week, is attended by more than 8,000 people. The schedule features workshops, exhibitions, panel discussions, films, and performances by some of today’s finest cowboy poets, musicians, and craftsmen.” Christian Science Monitor 01/02/02

Wednesday January 2

SAVING BOOKS: The Library of Congress has begun plans to de-acidify a million books in its collection. “More than 150 years ago, papermakers started using chemicals that made their product acidic and thus more susceptible to decay.” The Library has a “plan to de-cidify about 8.5 million of the library’s 18.7 million books, a move that is intended to add hundreds of years to the life of the books.” The New York Times 01/01/02

PUBLISHING THE ARTWORLD: As the artworld gets more complex, sprawling and difficult to sort through, a tiny magazine called Border Crossings produced in central Canada makes a pretty good guide. “Writers in Border Crossings accomplish, better than most, the critic’s most difficult task: communicating art ideas to non-artists and artists alike, explaining what matters to the first group without boring or appalling the second. For the most part, they avoid artspeak, the private language that disfigures many magazines.” National Post 01/02/02

Monday December 31

A BIZARRE YEAR: “The creepy revolution that has been transforming the business most radically since the mid–90s or so — the eradication of independent publishing houses and booksellers by massive, international “mass–media” conglomerates — has been the over–riding story of our recent literary times, with each year bringing sickeningly deeper realization of the impact of that take–over upon our intellectual and spiritual lives, not to mention how much you pay for a book, and who gets to write them. This year, however, that story seemed to become, suddenly, old news, or at least news too wearying to acknowledge anymore.” MobyLives 12/30/01

POET IAN HAMILTON, 61: “Highly regarded British poet and biographer Ian Hamilton, whose unauthorized life of J.D. Salinger was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, has died at the age of 61.” Nando Times (AP) 12/30/01

Friday December 28

DEFEATING THE ARAB MYTH: Novelist Hanan al-Shaykh is a remarkable writer, but she sometimes wishes that people would stop assuming she’s a remarkable woman as well, simply because she chose to leave her home in the Arab world to make a life in the West. In her newest book, she is determined to cut off at the knees some of the stereotypes that Westerners are forever laying at the feet of Arab immigrants. Nando Times (CSM News Service) 12/27/01

Thursday December 27

SADDAM HUSSEIN, HUMBLE AUTHOR: Saddam Hussein has published a second novel. “Al-Qala’ah al-Hasinah (“The Fortified Castle”) appeared this week in bookshops and all public libraries in Baghdad and was hailed on state-run television and by the newspaper al-Jumhouriya as a ‘great artistic work.’ The cover gives no clue to the writer’s identity, saying cryptically that it is a ‘novel by its author,’ while a note inside explains that the writer ‘did not wish to put his name on it out of humility and modesty’.” CNN.com 12/20/01

Wednesday December 26

THE STORY WITHIN: “English-language writing about Hong Kong and much of Asia has long been the province of Western expatriates or writers passing through, but increasingly this work is being done by Asian authors.” The New York Times 12/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday December 21

BRITISH ACADEMY SPLITS ITS BOOK PRIZE: “An acclaimed biography of Hitler and an account of the medieval English “empire” shared the first British Academy book prize, announced yesterday. The judges said both Ian Kershaw’s second volume on the Nazi leader, Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis, and The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343, by Rees Davies, fully deserved the prize as works of impeccable scholarship which were accessible to the general public.” The Guardian (UK) 12/20/01

THE FEARLESS BARRY TROTTER: Writer Michael Gerber has written a parody of the Harry Potter marketing machine called Barry Trotter and the Unauthorised Parody. “The book is a dig at Warner Bros’ enormous marketing campaign for the recent blockbusting film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and what Gerber regards as their excessively zealous control of the Harry Potter brand. ‘I got really annoyed when I heard about Warner Bros shutting down kids’ Potter websites,’ he said. ‘Their behaviour seemed mean-spirited and overbearing, not to mention silly. Potter fans have a very intense, personal relationship with the books, and I don’t think that’s something you can disregard, just because you’ve purchased the rights’.” The Guardian (UK) 12/19/01

THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM: The idiosyncratic personal-style journalism which marked much of the second half of the twentieth century may now be fading away. “The kind of exquisite description that brought forth drama from the everyday seemed excessive, even grotesque, when applied to mass carnage in downtown New York. Perhaps in part as a result, two different genres – genres deeply out of fashion in the 1990s – have now reemerged. The first is the essay – the non-reported, non-narrative, political or historical analysis. The second is the somber profile of a person in power.” The New Republic 12/20/01

A YOU-DUNNIT: Edinburgh writer Ian Rankin is auctioning off characters in his next crime novel. “The creator of Inspector Rebus is offering two places in his next work to the highest bidders. One will go to the person who bids the most in the e-mail auction and the other to the company which offers the most. The auction, to be held by e-mail, will raise cash for two charities supporting people with disabilities in the Third World and in Britain. ‘Worldwide fame and immortality. It’s not a bad deal really’.” The Scotsman 12/21/01

Thursday December 20

LIGHT HOLIDAY READING: “For the professionals there are two kinds of reading. There’s work reading, with an editing eye, as manuscripts come to the office in whole or part, to be read and re-read, the writer’s art in progress as it goes through its creative transmutations. And there’s zeal that comes with reading for fun those books that one selects carefully and puts aside for pleasure, for vacation reading. If such reading is exquisite recreation for most of us, imagine the luxury for someone who reads for a paycheck all year.” The New York Times 12/20/01 (one-time registration required for access)

KID LIT WAS DIFFERENT A GENERATION AGO: With the emergence of JK Rowling, and the resurgence of JRR Tolkien, it’s easy to assume that magic and fantasy have always been staples of children’s literature. But 35 years ago, Gore Vidal was complaining that “the librarians who dominate the juvenile market tend to be brisk tweedy ladies whose interests are mechanical rather than imaginative. Never so happy as when changing a fan belt, they quite naturally want to communicate their joy in practical matters to the young. The result has been a depressing literature of how-to-do things while works of invention are sternly rejected.” New York Review of Books 12/03/64

TO JUSTIFY FANTASY: “To read Shakespeare is respectable, but if you read Tolkien, well, aren’t you supposed to outgrow it? Unfortunately, among much of the literati, there’s a belief that fantasy literature is something less than what the classics of the Western canon teach. You know, fantasy is just escapism. But it’s also about the search for truth and for our place in the world, a yearning that has only heightened since Sept. 11.” Christian Science Monitor 12/19/01

Wednesday December 19

WHAT’S HAPPENED TO WRITING ABOUT FOOD? What could be more sensual than food? So why do so many modern cookbooks read so unimaginatively? “When it comes to cookbooks, it’s hard to be critical, because the poor modern recipe is about as original and engaging as the dishwasher manual, and every bit as literary.” Salon 12/19/01

THE STRESS OF BEING A READER: The guilt can be almost overwhelming. Sure, you read – good books, too, and hefty tomes that take weeks to plow through. “But at some point along the path to discovery, the reader confronts his or her reading mortality. There’s only so much time. And there are so many great books.” So how do you choose what to read, and what you can afford to let slip by? National Post (Canada) 12/19/01

Tuesday December 18

1 SONNET, 3 COUPLETS, AND A BUCKET O’ VERSE TO GO: What’s that? You say you’d love to spend your days sucking down verse after verse of cool, refreshing poetry, but simply haven’t the time, what with the conference calls, the board meetings, and all? Well, now you can have it all, with Poem-Me, the fabulous new British poetry service which delivers daily helpings of “thought-provoking” poesy right to your very own cell phone! Don’t wait another minute – order now! BBC 12/18/01

DYING REQUEST: The words of a terminally ill poet are flying off shelves at Barnes & Noble, and their author has signed a multi-book publishing deal to write more. Six months ago, no one had ever heard of Mattie Stepanek, and never would have, but for the sympathies of a publisher who agreed to his (apparent) deathbed request to have his work publshed. Stepanek is still fighting for survival, and still cranking out the verse. Oh, and he’s eleven years old. Minneapolis Star Tribune (courtesy Washington Post) 12/18/01

REMEMBERING SEBALD: When novelist W.G. Sebald was killed last week in a horrifying auto crash, the literary world lost one of its most intriguing stars. From one of his editors at Random House: “His project was the most heroic I know – he looked unflinchingly at things all of us find easy not to look at, and dragged them into the light.” Boston Globe 12/18/01

Monday December 17

DO BOOKS COST TOO MUCH? “Across the country this holiday season, recession-minded book buyers are suffering a wave of sticker shock. Cover prices have crossed thresholds over the last two years, and the big bookstore chains and online retailers have pulled back from previously widespread discounts. More shoppers face prices like $35 for hardcover nonfiction, $26 or more for a hardcover novel, $15 or more for upscale paperbacks. Customers show signs of resistance.” The New York Times 12/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)

WORD COUNTS: Word counts can tell a reader plenty about a piece of writing – like the cultural context, the tone, the hidden meaning. Any writer who overuses “very” for example, is probably over-enthusiastic. Computer word counting has made this kind of analysis of any text, easy for anyone. Sydney Morning Herald 12/17/01

Sunday December 16

PRIZE MESS: Literary awards are good for encouraging and promoting new books. But the ill-fated Chapters Prize, launched three years ago by the Canadian book superstore, forgot one crucial rule – administration counts. The Prize’s three year history (it was canceled in mid-contest this year) is an example of everything that can go wrong. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/15/01

Friday December 14

BOOK SALES REBOUNDING: In the weeks right after September 11, sales of books collapsed. Booksellers were pessimistic for the usually lucrative holiday season. “A key reason for that anxiety was the lack of attention that new books and authors had received from radio, television and other news media that were focusing their coverage, almost exclusively, on terrorism But higher-than-expected sales in the days after Thanksgiving have raised hopes throughout the book-selling world.” Chicago Tribune 12/14/01

HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN: Eighteen months ago, e-publisher MightyWords was the hottest thing in digital online publishing. Stephen King wrote a novella that the company sold for download over the internet, and hundreds of thousands of buyers jammed the site. But the market for e-books never developed and the company is closing. Toronto Star 12/14/01

ALLOWING WRITERS TO WRITE: “Northern Rock, the Newcastle-based bank, is giving three northern writers £20,000 a year for the next three years to do what they do best – write – a revolutionary concept in a world where the paltry sums available usually have lots of strings attached. The money, limited to writers who live in the north-east, is further proof of the widening gap in the way writers are treated in the north compared to their neglected southern cousins, and could spark an exodus north.” The Guardian (UK) 12/13/01

POWER OF THE WORD: “The King James Bible is, without question, a monument to the rhythmic power of the English language, but it also circumscribes the language itself, defining its linguistic and metaphoric possibilities – and thus the possibilities of how we think about ourselves and our place in the world.” Reason 12/01

Thursday December 13

THAT’S WHAT BEING A RECLUSE WILL GET YOU: A collection of letters by famously moody author J.D. Salinger and his daughter Margaret has failed to sell at an auction in New York. Sotheby’s had estimated that the collection, which spans 35 years of correspondence, would net upwards of $250,000. The bidding never got above $170,000 and was halted. Nando Times (AP) 12/12/01

Wednesday December 12

THE DARKER SIDE OF POOH: Winnie the Pooh is 75 years old and never bigger: “The spiritually minded can read The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet while logicians have to choose between Winnie-the-Pooh on Problem Solving and Pooh and the Philosopher. For literary critics there is The Pooh Perplex and The Postmodern Pooh while businessmen take lessons from Winnie-the-Pooh on Management. There is even a book for urban hipsters looking for the grungy side of the Hundred Acre Woods; Karen Finley’s Pooh Unplugged.” And yet, a case can be made for the insidious side of the Way of the Pooh. National Post 12/11/01

Tuesday December 11

NAIPAUL GETS HIS NOBEL, IF NOT IMMORTALITY: The Nobel Prizes, announced weeks ago, were handed out this week, and author V.S. Naipaul, one of the year’s most controversial recipients, picked up his literature Nobel. But unlike some of the Nobels, which tend to make lifelong heroes of their recipients, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been largely a hit-or-miss thing in the century that it has been awarded. Philadelphia Inquirer 12/11/01

Monday December 10

EXTRAVAGANT CLAIMS: A new biography of JRR Tolkien claims him as one of the great literary authors of the 20th Century. But “the tone of many reviews – including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books and the Guardian – has been one of condescending scorn. The e-mail from bastions of higher learning have the same complaint. How can he treat Tolkien and his hobbits, elves and dwarves as literature?” Philadelphia Inquirer 12/09/01

TRENDSETTING: Some trends are easy to trace – it makes sense that a successful book about embroidery will spawn a cluster of imitators. But what drives the myriad boomlets of books about arcane things – like a wave of books with the color red in the title or the word “honeymoon”? Surely there’s some cosmic order to it all… Mobylives 12/09/01

Sunday December 9

PROTECTING ENDANGERED WRITERS: Salman Rushdie is the most famous, but there are many writers living under death sentences. To try to help protect them, The International Parliament of Writers was set up in 1993, “in the wake of the Rushdie fatwa and the growing incidence of similar attacks on writers. It aims to protect not only freedom of speech and publication but also the physical safety of writers. In its early days, the IPW (or PIE, as it is known abroad) came up with the idea of providing cities of refuge for writers forced to live in exile. There is now a flourishing network, hosting writers from many countries, writing in many languages.” The Guardian (UK) 12/08/01

Friday December 7

OPRAH THE GOOD: At first look, the highbrow literary book clubs of yesterday might seem not to have much in common with today’s Oprah Book Club. But “their respective goals are similar: to enlighten and to instruct and, importantly, to somehow elevate their audience in so doing.” The Atlantic 12/01

ROLE FOR WRITERS: “Even during the Soviet era, when virtually all of Russia’s finest writers and poets were exiled, killed, imprisoned, savagely censored, or forbidden to publish, Russian literature has persisted in addressing the core issues and dilemmas of human existence, taking humanity’s measure, and explaining Russia and Russians to themselves and the world.” The Idler 12/07/01

Thursday December 6

CANADA’S WELL-READ GIRLS: A new international test measuring the reading ability of kids, shows that Canada ranks high in the world, second only to Finland. But the terrific showing was due entirely to Canada’s girls, who scored well . Canada’s boys scored significantly lower – an average of 30 points lower – causing some to call for a plan to raise boys’ literacy. National Post 12/06/01

HOW TO KEEP THE PAGES TURNING: The publisher of Lord of the Rings only ran off three thousand copies the first time around, figuring not many readers would wade through 1077 pages. Yet tens of millions of them have, and the reason is “there is one big thing that Tolkien got right: he got rhythm. His instinct for the procedures of Dark Age saga was as reliable as his indifference to the mores of the machine age, and he soon established a beat — a basic pulse, throbbing below the surface of the book and forcing you, day after day, to turn the page. We can no more leave Frodo stranded on his mission than his friends can.” The New Yorker 12/10/01

Wednesday December 5

THE POWER OF AN UNREAD BOOK: Recently, Canada’s largest bookseller announced that it would not carry, or place orders for, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s infamous manifesto. The announcement caused much discussion of the dangers of censorship, but, asks one critic, do you know anyone who has read Mein Kampf? Assuming not, isn’t the real power of the work its very existence, rather than its availability? The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 12/05/01

A SNIT OVER SNICKET: Children’s literature tends to focus on the supernatural and suspenseful, and is therefore an easy target for adults who mistakenly think that kids’ lives should be nothing but sweetness and light. Since September 11, author Daniel Handler has been criticized for continuing to churn out his popular series of darkly comic “Lemony Snicket” books, which feature evil plots, scary situations, and narrow escapes for its youthful protagonists. But Handler is turning the criticism around, and insisting that it is those who would shield children from the truth of the world around them who are irresponsible. Chicago Tribune 12/05/01

GETTING PAST THE WHOLE UGLY SUICIDE THING: “Ted Hughes was perhaps the greatest British poet of his generation but it was his tragedy to be chiefly known, particularly in North America, as the dastardly husband whose infidelities drove the fragile Sylvia Plath — feminist icon — to gas herself at the age of 30.” But a controversial new biography of the poet claims that such tragedies are no reason to ignore one of the geniuses of 20th-century writing. Toronto Star 12/05/01

Monday December 3

AN AUTHOR WHO WANTS TO DO IT: Burned by her last choice of a book for her Book Club, Oprah asked Rohinton Mistry, her latest choice, if he really wanted to be chosen. Mistry’s A Fine Balance is the first Canadian work she has chosen and only the second by a non-American. He said yes. Toronto Star 12/02/01

BOOK SALES RECOVERING: Booksellers are still cautious, but sales of books in the US since Thanksgiving seem to be up a bit over last year. Large booksellers are deeply discounting popular books, but even at independent stores sales are good. Publishers Weekly 12/03/01

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

Wednesday October 31

IN BLURBS WE TRUST: Ever wonder about the recommendations of books by bookstores? Can you trust them? Well… “The sums involved are considerable: the leading high-street chain, W.H. Smith, charges £10,000 to call a book ‘Read of the Week’. Books etc.’s ‘Showcase’ and Borders’ ‘Best’ cost as much as £2,500, and Amazon demands £6,000 for its ‘Book of the Month’ endorsement. To have a book called ‘Latest Thing’ will set you back £15,000, and ‘Fresh Talent’, an accolade recently won by Richard Littlejohn, costs £2,850.” The Spectator 10/20/01

ACADEMICS QUIBBLE OVER ACADEMIC LIFE: Harvard English Professor Marjorie Garber and Berkeley English Professor Frederick Crews both have new books out about their work. “Garber believes that academic jargon is actually ‘language in action’, marking ‘the place where thinking has been’, while Crews believes that it is the inscription on the tombstone of the place where thinking died.” London Review 10/31/01

BIG BUCKS/LOW SALES: At a time when many serious writers have difficulty even getting published, publishers are paying millions of dollars to celebrities to pen books. But those books are rarely successes – either critically or at the cash register. In fact, they sell poorly. So why the big money? Poets & Writers 10/01

Monday October 29

THE GREAT NOVEMBER NOVEL: “National Novel Writing Month, where the aim is to produce a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days, starts on Wednesday. “What people need to do is just write and write anything that comes into their heads and if they did 50,000 words I’d be thrilled.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/29/01

TAKING ON OPRAH: Writer Jonathan Franzen’s criticism of Oprah’s book club has brought him scorn from critics and other writers. “In a sense, the episode underscored how right Mr. Franzen was about the power of television and its transformation of literary culture. But the aftermath also showed that if there was ever a time in the book business when authors wrote to impress critics and their peers without regard to book sales, getting caught in that posture is now almost embarrassing.” The New York Times 10/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday October 26

ANTHRAX SCARE POSTPONES POET: New American poet laureate Billy Collins “was to have read from his poetry Thursday night at the Library of Congress, one of the main duties of the poet laureate. The reading was canceled because of tests of the library buildings for anthrax and was tentatively rescheduled for Dec. 6.” Nando Times (AP) 10/25/01

• POETRY TO THE PEOPLE: America’s new poet laureate Billy Collins “begins his very public year in Washington tonight with a reading at the Library of Congress. At age 60, he has become famous, as poets go, by touching something untrivial in people, without resorting to kitsch or pandering. He may be a poet of a sort not seen in America since Robert Frost. Though his poems are anything but ordinary, he manages to touch a large audience by using ordinary language, and by writing in and out of the dooryards of ordinary life.” Boston Globe 10/25/01

CAMPAIGNING FOR OUR OWN: Columnist Noah Richler takes the Governor General Awards leadership to task for not including a book by his dad and that of a family friend for consideration for this year’s awards. National Post (Canada) 10/26/01

Thursday October 25

PISSING OFF OPRAH: Jonathan Franzen’s new book The Corrections is the most-hyped publishing project of the year. Among the stars aligning right for it was Oprah’s decision to make it an Oprah Book Club selection. But then Franzen dissed O and her fans not once, but twice in the media. So Oprah withdrew the choice and Franzen’s scrambled to apologize. Too late. “One can only wonder why Franzen went after her, and not once but twice, and in such ugly fashion. All she offered Franzen was a significantly increased readership. What’s to not like? ” Mobylives 10/24/01

• ALL ABOUT THE STICKER: “Franzen didn’t go so far as to reject Oprah per se. The essence of his complaint, as he cast it, was that the label signified not simply Oprah’s endorsement of the book, but the book’s endorsement of Oprah. Franzen seems to want us to believe that his anti-establishment sensibilities have been trampled.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/25/01

BOOKER BOOST: Peter Carey’s “True History of the Kelly Gang has soared from 30th place to eighth in the British hardback fiction bestsellers list following last week’s Booker win – selling 3,348 last week, compared with 436 the week before the prize announcement.” But British readers evidently prefer runner-up Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which was No.1 last week “selling 8,232 copies last week, about four times as many as the previous week.” The Age (AAP) 10/25/01

BILLYBALL: When Billy Collins was named America’s new poet laureate earlier this year, critics couldn’t help but note that he was one of the few poets who actually makes decent money at his craft. “All of this man-bites-dog astonishment condescends to poetry, where such small sums count as fortunes. Yet the very existence of a ‘popular poet’ is reassuring for an art seemingly doomed to ivory-tower irrelevance.” So what is so appealing about Collins’ work that makes him stand out? The New Republic 10/23/01

HAS THE LITERARY SCENE CHANGED IN 20 YEARS? Let’s see. Twenty years ago “Philip Roth was happily living with Claire Bloom. Salman Rushdie was just a mild-mannered lapsed Muslim with one novel under his belt. Allen Ginsberg was still alive and wandering the East Village. Zadie Smith turned five.” Yep, things have changed. Village Voice Literary Supplement October 2001

AGAINST LOVE POETRY: It’s the title of Irish poet Eavan Boland’s new volume. “So much of European love poetry is court poetry, coming out of the glamorous traditions of the court. Love poetry, from the troubadours on, is traditionally about that romantic lyric moment. There’s little about the ordinariness of love, the dailiness of love, or the steadfastness of love.” The New Yorker 10/29/01

Wednesday October 24

GOVERNOR GENERAL’S SHORT LIST: Canada’s Governor General Award for fiction announces its shortlist. Jane Urquhart and Richard B. Wright picked up nominations after earlier this month being named to the Giller fiction short list. “The other English fiction nominees for the GG awards, announced by the Canada Council for the Arts, are Yann Martel of Montreal for Life of Pi, Tessa McWatt of Toronto for Dragons Cry and Thomas Wharton of Edmonton for Salamander.” Toronto Star 10/23/01

PUBLISHING-NOT-SO-ON-DEMAND: An on-demand publisher tries to put out a book of essays about September 11 in New York, with proceeds going to the Red Cross. But it turns out that “on-demand” is at the mercy of traditional distribution systems. Getting big distributors like Amazon to carry the book proves…how shall we say…a demanding proposition? Salon 10/20/01

OVERCOMING AGE: “Who has it worse: young writers or old? Ageism, it would appear, is a double-edged sword. In columns littering the opinion pages from London to New York to Toronto, the Old Guard and the Young Turks are lining up. Not, as one might have expected, to say who is best. As Robert Hughes has it, ours is a culture of complaint. The most important thing our artists have to establish is their victim credentials.” GoodReports 10/24/01

Monday October 22

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE WITH BIG FANS: At its peak, Lingua Franca magazine had a circulation of only 15,000. Newstand sales never topped 2000. But its fans in academe were many – far beyond its circulation base, even as it announced it would shut down last week. “This can’t work as a conventional business. It can only work as something dynamic and risky. It can only work for an investor who wants to do something dazzling and sexy to get attention.” Chicago Tribune 10/22/01

THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: Think America’s war in Afghanistan is anything new? A hundred years ago the British were embroiled in the region. And “Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim – as well as his 1888 short story, The Man Who Would Be King – provide lessons on the risks the country now faces, even lessons on the quagmires of nation-building.” Dallas Morning News 10/21/01

THE ESSENCE OF WRITING: “Literature is amoral, like biology, like physics, like the universe itself – and like the letters of the alphabet we use. Literature is an energy, an imaginative energy, which reflects all aspects of human nature. It is not part of our schoolmastering, but part of our learning in a wider and more imaginative sense. It teaches us to refute simplicities, simplicities which neatly separate good and evil. Above all, it is not just a set of cautionary or exemplary tales, but unpredictable, awkwardly shaped, not leading directly to bigger salaries and wages.” The Independent (UK) 10/22/01

Sunday October 21

THE WRITER AS CELEBRITY: “In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century many successful and much-admired authors were unknown to the general public and to their readers – unknown in the sense that their appearance, their personalities, their habits, and their private lives were indeed private.” How different from today, when writers have become performing animals and every aspect of their lives is open to scrutiny in the press. The Guardian (UK) 10/20/01

Friday October 19

ALL ABOUT BOOK(ER) SALES: The honor’s nice, but Peter Carey’s Booker Prize win will sell a lot of his books. “When Peter won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, we released the paperback edition on the day that it was announced. We printed 20,000 and didn’t know if it was going to be the stock for a day or a year. We sold them in an hour, and in the next six months sold 200,000 copies.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/19/01

Thursday October 18

CAREY TAKES BOOKER: Australian writer Peter Carey has won this year’s Booker Prize. “Carey, 58, is only the second writer in the Booker’s 32-year history, after JM Coetzee, to win twice.” The Guardian (UK) 10/18/01

• PUBLIC CHOOSES DIFFERENT BOOKER FAVORITE: The so called “People’s Booker,” voted by the public, goes to Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The Guardian (UK) 10/18/01

LINGUA FRANCA SUSPENDS PUBLICATION: The current issue is coming out, but work on the next has stopped. “While Lingua Franca never turned a profit and its circulation hovered around 15,000, news of its apparent demise elicited exclamations of dismay in the world of letters.” The New York Times 10/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)

• BRILL’S CONTENT FOLDS: “Yesterday, after sputtering for years, Brill’s Content magazine suspended publication, ending a three-year run of dissecting the personalities, obsessions and machinations of news organizations.” The New York Times 10/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday October 17

LOOKING FOR SHAKESPEARE: Who was William Shakespeare? Some say he was the “17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Oxford was eminently equipped to tackle the range and scope evident in Shakespeare’s work: because of his education (arts, law, sciences), his renowned excellence in letters, his prowess at sports and arms, his travels in Italy and France, his patronage of literary and scientific contemporaries.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/01

• BUT NOT THAT THEORY: “The Oxfordian case is founded in snobbery, the idea that a non-aristocratic lad from the country could never have had the talent or insight to write such masterpieces.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/01

EXPECT A RUN ON PIPES AND WEIRD HATS: “For devotees of Sherlock Holmes, arguably the world’s most famous detective, and his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the game will be afoot in Toronto this weekend. About 250 fans from around the world are expected at a conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of the most famous Holmes work, The Hound of the Baskervilles.” National Post (CP) 10/17/01

Tuesday October 16

BAILING ON THE BOOKER: Booker Prize sponsor Iceland, a frozen food producer, is announcing it is withdrawing from sponsoring Britain’s top literary prize. The company says that “new sponsors should be found for the literary competition as it sees ‘no commercial link’ between its supermarket business and the literary award. Iceland inherited the prize only because of a merger with food group Booker in 2000.” BBC 10/16/01

DEFINING AMERICAN HIGHBROW OF THE 50s: “The concept of a highbrow culture, the culture of great books and the like, depends on the concept of a lowbrow, or popular, culture, whose characteristics highbrow culture defines itself against. Of course, there have always been good books and bad books, serious music and easy listening, coterie art and poster art. Making those distinctions is easy if you just put everything on a continuum, and rank things from worst to best. The mid-century notion of highbrow culture required something different—it required a rupture between the high and the low, an absolute difference, not a relative one.” The New Yorker 10/15/01

THE NOBEL FOR LITERATURE: There is second-guessing almost every year; still, most winners since World War Two have been substantial literary figures. Much better choices, in fact, than “the bewildering early choices of the Nobel Committee, so obscure as to appear now wilfully blind. They were not the choices of Nobel himself, of course, but of the members of the Swedish Academy trying to guess what the repentant merchant of death would like.” Boston Review 10/01

• Previously: NAIPAUL WINS NOBEL IN LITERATURE: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’. V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.” Nobel Institute (Sweden) 10/11/01

REMEMBERING HOW YOU GOT THERE: Joyce Carol Oates says she writes all the time – and she must, considering her prodigious output. But she remembers how and where she started. “She still sends short stories into The Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, one of the first places that published her work. And she spoke Saturday at the magazine’s 75th anniversary celebration.” Washington Times (AP) 10/16/01

Monday October 15

BRAVE CHOICE: V.S. Naipaul is the Nobel Institute’s bravest choice in years for the literature prize. “In choosing him as this year’s laureate for literature, the Nobel committee has allowed the controversial Naipaul’s influence – his aura – to accrue to the prize as much as the other way around.” Salon 10/14/01

AWARDS TOM CLANCY WILL NEVER WIN: “A German philosopher and sociologist who has captured – and at times defined – the Zeitgeist of postwar Germany was honored Sunday with the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Peace Prize, the event’s highest honor. Juergen Habermas is renowned for his talent of pointing out deficits in the values held by Western society, including democracy and equality. His writings have been translated into dozens of languages and he has been compared to the late philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre.” Nando Times (AP) 10/14/01

THE NON-FICTION SQUEEZE: “Nonfiction, or nonfiction that masquerades as fiction, nonfiction that aspires to be fiction, nonfiction that wants to be fiction when it grows up, is in sudden, best-selling vogue.” It’s squeezing out fiction. This is not a good thing. San Francisco Bay Guardian 10/12/01

THE WEAKEST ‘LINK’ EXCUSE: “Frozen food retailer Iceland will announce on Wednesday that it intends to withdraw from sponsorship of the Booker prize. The current sponsor will say that new sponsors should be found for the literary competition as it sees ‘no commercial link’ between its supermarket business and the literary award.” BBC 10/15/01

THE VAGARIES OF FACT OR FICTION: A Toronto politician trying to get elected is haunted by a book he wrote years ago that contains unsavory details of his life. He claims the book was fiction, but the book was marketed as a true story. “The non-fiction novel and gonzo journalism have blurred the line between fact and fiction, and a controversy like this highlights the difficulty in keeping them apart.” Good Reports 10/15/01

E-BOOK SPUTTER: “Electronic publishing has turned its focus to niche markets at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair as the industry admits most readers would still rather curl up with a book than a bulky screen. In contrast with the euphoria of last year, when some electronic publishers predicted paper books would become museum pieces within a generation, the industry has scaled back its ambitions since the crisis that struck the new economy.” National Post (Canada) 10/15/01

Sunday October 14

LANGUAGE BARRIER: One of the greatest challenges confronting European publishers is successfully translating foreign books into the local language without losing any of the style, meaning, or minutiae of the original. A mediocre translation can mean the difference between a success and a failure on the market, and many publishers are loath to take the risk. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/12/01

CHASING THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN NOVEL: Once upon a time, Australian writers loved to tackle big, global ideas and wide-ranging philosophical subtexts in their work. But these days, it seems that every new novel to hit the bestseller list is narrowly focused, specifically targeted, and just so gosh-darned local. Whatever happened to collective experience? Sydney Morning Herald 10/13/01

GOLDIE WON’T BE STARRING IN IT, WILL SHE? “Film rights to a newly published Mark Twain novelette have been sold by the Buffalo library to the Hollywood production company owned by movie stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Cosmic Entertainment will have exclusive rights to “A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage,” written by Twain in 1876 but published for the first time this year, Buffalo & Erie County Public Library executives said Thursday.” Baltimore Sun (AP) 10/12/01

IMMODEST, MAYBE, BUT STILL NOBEL: This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V.S. Naipaul, is nothing if not aware of his own accomplishments. He claims, among other things, to have helped bring India into modern times through his writing, and to have helped “educate” the country’s population. Not everyone appreciated the help: “The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry.” BBC 10/12/01

Friday October 12

SOME E-BOOKS MAKE MONEY: Prize money, that is. Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh won the $50,000 Grand Prize for Fiction, and American journalist Steven Levy won the Grand Prize for non-fiction at the Frankfurt Book Fair. To be eligible for the competition, “entrants must include technical enhancements that distinguish the ebook from its printed version.” The Guardian (UK) 11/12/01

COMING TO TERMS WITH AN OLD FRIEND/ENEMY: Think of Ödön von Horváth as Germany’s answer to Garrison Keillor – a much-beloved writer and teller of tales about his hometown that make locals distinctly uncomfortable. But unlike Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Horváth’s Murnau really does exist, and his airing of the burg’s dirty laundry for his own literary gain has not sat well with the natives. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/11/01

Thursday October 11

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEES: The two most widely (some might say flagrantly) publicized books of the past year were Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, and David McCullough’s literary biography John Adams. Nominees for the National Book Awards have been announced; Franzen made the list, McCullough didn’t. The National Book Foundation has its own website, listing all nominees in all categories. Nando Times 10/11/01

MAYBE IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE EASY: James Joyce’s Ulysses may be the best and surely is one of the most complex novels of the twentieth century. Four years ago Macmillan published a new edition, inserting material from the author’s unused manuscript material to produce an easier-to-read version. Now the trustees of the Joyce estate are suing for copyright infringement because the Macmillan edition “altered some of the author’s original punctuation, spelling and name places.” The Guardian (UK) 10/10/01

A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF PHILOSOPHY? If the Frankfurt Book Fair is any indication, Europe is about to be hit with a wave of high-minded philosophy tomes and arts books that address the more abstract, existential elements of art. Such books had fallen out of fashion for a time, but publishers apparently think the public is ready to embrace them again. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/10/01

NAIPAUL WINS NOBEL IN LITERATURE: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’. V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.” Nobel Institute (Sweden) 10/11/01

Wednesday October 10

POOH BEAR AT 75: Yes, it’s true. Winnie-ther-Pooh (don’t you know what “ther” means?) turns 75 years old this week, and A.A. Milne’s classic tales of childhood, imagination, and the Hundred Acre Wood are as popular as they ever were. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/10/01

SEX, BOOZE, AND SCHMOOZING: Is the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference really all that it’s cracked up to be? “What I believe is that you can make people better writers,” says its director. On the other hand, says a (now former) faculty member, “This place is the shocking culmination of all that is foolish and ill-conceived in the writing programs. The boosterism, the childishness, the prolonged collegiate atmosphere. It’s like a fucking parody.” The New Yorker 10/15/01

TO DISCUSS A MOCKINGBIRD: For the past couple weeks, everyone (well, nearly) in Chicago has been reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and this is the week they’re supposed to gather and discuss the book. So, what are they saying? One of the city’s papers assembled a not-quite typical panel to find out. Chicago Sun-Times 10/09/01

TAKING ON THE BIG BOYS: In Germany, small and medium-sized presses struggle daily against the larger corporate publishing houses to maintain their small share of the market. But “[u]nlike the United States, where 80 percent of the publishing industry is dominated by just five companies, more than 90 percent of the roughly 2,000 German book publishers remain independent.” In fact, in the battle between the many Davids and the few Goliaths, the little guys have been winning more than they’re losing. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/09/01

THE POEM, THE TEMPLE, THE PEOPLE: The temple at Angkor Wat incorporates a poem which has never been translated into English, and never before been the subject of academic study. Now it is being studied, and translated; it’s expected to reveal much about the history and culture of the Khmer people, going back to the twelfth century. Humanities (NEH) October 01

Tuesday October 9

CAREY COLLECTION SNUBBED: “The National Library of Australia has declined to buy a collection of the early personal archives of Australian author Peter Carey, prompting a claim that they are likely to be sold overseas.” Carey is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken authors, and is considered a favorite to win his second Booker prize this month. The Age (Melbourne) 10/09/01

MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING: In fact, if your book sells only eight copies, it’s just about nothing. Still, that could be enough to get you noticed. It got one book nominated for Wednesday’s Frankfurt eBook Awards. Wired 10/09/01

Monday October 8

WRITERLY ATTACK: B.R. Myers provoked the biggest literary debate of the year this summer when he wrote in The Atlantic that much of contemporary fiction was not worthy of attention, then attacked critics and the literary establishment for maintaining the status quo. The counterattacks came predictably, but the most bizarre might have been by Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times… Mobylives 10/07/01

TODAY’S LIT GOING CRIT? Is contemporary literature doomed to be forgotten? “Philip Roth . . . said this: Literature ‘will probably more or less disappear except in a cultic way over the next 25 years. . . . The screen did it, didn’t it? . . . The human mind prefers the screen to the page. There’s nothing we can do about it.’ Then Naipaul was quoted in the Guardian of London this month as saying this: ‘Nearly everything written in the last century will crumble away to dust – all the novels. In every novel written now, there’s an element of mimicry.’ “ Washington Post 10/08/01

Friday October 5

WINNING THE HARD WAY: Later this month Peter Carey could be only the second writer to win the Booker Prize twice. He just won Australia’s top literary prize, but it was a peculiar win. Frank Moorhouse had been announced as the winner, but two hours later Moorhouse was told there had been a mistake and that Carey had won. Sydney Morning Herald 10/05/01

CANADIAN BOOK PRIZE FINALISTS: Canadian literature is hot these days. So paying attention to the Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary award, is a good idea. The list of previous winners includes a Who’s Who of Canadian writers. But this year, the six finalists are relative unknowns, including a first-time novelist. National Post (Canada) 10/05/01

Thursday October 4

THE GILLER SHORT LIST: Six finalists have been chosen from among 78 books for the $25,000 Giller Prize, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards. The winner will be announced next month at an awards dinner which “has become the social event of the season for the Canadian literary crowd.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/04/01

TAKING BACK THE PRIZE: Frank Moorhouse was told he had won the Victorian Premiere’s Literary Prize for his first novel. He’d even started spending the $20,000 prize in his head. Then came a call from his agent. “Although the State Library, which administers the awards, earlier that day had confirmed his win in calls to the media, it had subsequently retracted his name, saying a ‘typo’ had been made.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/04/01

READERS DEMAND BOOK COVERAGE: Last spring, the San Francisco Chronicle cut back its books section to save money, incorporating it into another section of the paper. But so many readers complained that “on Sunday, the Chronicle’s readers will get what they want – and more – when the newspaper debuts its new Book Review, a broadsheet-size, stand-alone section that will wrap around Datebook.” Los Angeles Times 10/04/01

UNFILTERED ACCESS: New federal regulations say that public libraries will lose federal funding if they don’t filter out objectionable material from computers in the libraries. “There are over 160,000 school and public libraries in the United States; Many stand to lose much-needed federal funding if they don’t follow requirements.” Now the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to keep filters off library computers. Wired 10/04/01

Wednesday October 3

THE SCIENCE OF LIT PRIZES: Okay, so this year’s crop of Canadian novels isn’t so captivating as last year’s. But there’s still a Giller Prize to be handed out, and there’s no reason we can’t come up with a fairly scientific formula for how to choose the short list… isn’t there? National Post 10/03/01

Tuesday October 2

AN OLD ORDER PASSES: With thirty miles of shelving, Foyles in London is generally regarded as the world’s biggest bookshop. And until recently, it was one of the most old-fashioned. Traditions have been changing, however, and it may no longer be the gathering spot for “women wearing big hats who live in Knightsbridge and Kensington.” The Guardian (UK) 10/01/01

LITERARY LIST: Robert Belknap has written a dissertation that looks at “the list” as a literary construct. “Lists are deliberate structures, built with care and craft, and perfectly suited to rigorous analysis. They compile a history, gather evidence, order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness, and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences.” It’s an original idea – so why can’t he get a teaching job or get his dissertation published? Chronicle of Higher Education 10/01/01

Monday October 1

THE END OF WRITING (IN SF)? A San Francisco writer leaves town feeling unappreciated. “Outside of academia, nobody seems interested in reading anymore. I’m saying this not to generate pity but to present a tough fact: technology and entertainment are leading the way to a sort of glossy, cushy dark age. When people say they want ‘the arts’ in San Francisco, what they really mean is they want Entertainment – yummy restaurants, Frappuccinos, road companies of Broadway shows, virtual bowling, clubs.” San Francisco Bay Guardian 10/01/01

TEACHING WRITING: Can you teach good writing? “What you can’t teach, it seems to me, is the right kind of observation or the right kind of interpretation of what has been observed. It worries me to think of all those earnest pupils who have diligently mastered the mechanics, wondering with varying degrees of misery and rage why the finished recipe just hasn’t somehow worked. Washington Post 09/30/01

POWER OF POETRY: Many have chosen poetry as a way to express their feelings after September 11. “Almost immediately after the event, improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Heights and elsewhere. And poems flew through cyberspace across the country in e-mails from friend to friend.” The New York Times 10/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday September 28

FIGHTING BACK TEARS WITH BELLY LAUGHS: Ever since the attacks of September 11, comedians of all stripes have been walking on eggshells. Some offer deadly serious messages of condolence, some skirt the subject entirely, but no one has tried to make comedic hay from the tragedy. Then, this week, the latest issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion hit newsstands, with content devoted entirely to the fallout from the attacks. Daring? Yes. In poor taste? Perhaps. But very, very funny. Wired 09/27/01

IN GOOD COMPANY: The American Library Association has issued its latest list of books that have been yanked from shelves or challenged for their “suitability.” J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series tops the list with numerous claims that the books promote satanism, presumably in the same way the Mark Twain promoted racism and John Steinbeck promoted the beating of people from Oklahoma. BBC 09/28/01

Wednesday September 26

AUSSIE BOOK GLUT? Is Australia’s book industry publishing too many books? Some say yes – the 200 or so Australian novels published this year were almost double the number published 10 years ago. “This glut on the market has created a ‘literary logjam’ that was ‘suffocating’ readers and cutting into authors’ incomes, while the proliferation of creative writing courses has created a climate of unrealistic expectations and a ‘false sense of reality’ among aspiring writers. More and more novels are then being published and the infrastructure of reviewing, media attention and bookshop space is not coping.” Sydney Morning Herald 09/26/01

EDITH WHARTON COMES INTO HER OWN: For forty years she was dismissed as “a reactionary, an antimodernist, a rich old-school genteel snob, and a minor female version of Henry James.” Now it’s Henry James who is being overlooked, and Edith Wharton “no longer has to be judged by his standards.” New York Review of Books 10/04/01

Monday September 24

HARRY GOES PLATINUM: JK Rowling has won four platinum awards for her Harry Potter books. “The British book industry created the prizes, modeled after the music industry’s gold and platinum records. The awards are based on sales in bookstores, supermarkets and over the Internet. Platinum awards recognize sales of more than a million books. Rowling is believed to have sold more than 100 million books worldwide.” Raleigh News & Observer (AP) 09/23/01

Sunday September 23

NO MORE SATURDAY NIGHTS: Saturday Night, created in 1887 and Canada’s oldest magazine, has been put out of its misery. The magazine was shut down last week by new owners. It hadn’t made money in 60 years. “The reason, say industry experts, is that a series of desperate publishers and editors squandered the franchise’s name and loyal readership base. Projected losses ranged from $10-million to $12-million dollars for the magazine for this calendar year alone.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 09/22/01

COMFORT(?) IN NOSTRADAMUS? “Within hours of the suicide missions that toppled the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York on Sept. 11, there was a rush in Toronto’s libraries on a single book – not on the Qur’an, not on the Bible, not on any historical study of the ancient struggle between followers of Islam and Christ. The book everyone wanted contains the prophetic quatrains of 16th-century visionary Nostradamus, who, according to rumours burning up the Internet, had predicted the tragedy with stunning accuracy. The prediction was later disproved.” Toronto Star 09/22/01

Friday September 21

ALL OF PUSHKIN IN ENGLISH, AT LAST: Of major Russian literary figures, Alexander Pushkin is the least read outside his home country. The problem is that he is so difficult to translate. Now, after years of editorial wrangling and politicking, the final volumes are ready in the first complete edition of Pushkin’s works in English. The Moscow Times 09/21/01

Thursday September 20

THE DUTY OF THE WRITER IN TIME OF CRISIS: Is it irrelevant, in a time of tragedy and horror, to try to write a novel? Many writers – John Updike, Rosellen Brown, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, Ward Just, Robert Stone, and Joyce Carol Oates – have been asking themselves that question. “While many temporarily questioned their work, they ended up affirming to themselves the value and purpose of what they do.” The New York Times 09/20/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday September 19

BERYL BOMBS OUT OF BOOKER: Beryl Bainbridge has been the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Booker Prize after she was listed on the prize’s longlist. But the shortlist is now out and she didn’t make it. Finalists include Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Rachel Seiffert, Ali Smith, Andrew Miller, and David Mitchell made the cut. This is the first year that judges revealed the 24 books on the longlist. The Guardian (UK) 09/18/01

• IS THE BOOKER FIXED? “There is a well-established London literary community. Rushdie doesn’t get shortlisted now because he has attacked that community. That is not a good game plan if you want to win the Booker. Norman Mailer has found the same thing in the US – you have to ‘be a citizen’ if you want to win prizes. The real scandal is that Martin Amis has never won the prize. In fact, he has only been shortlisted once and that was for Time’s Arrow, which was not one of his strongest books. That really is suspicious. He pissed people off with Dead Babies and that gets lodged in the culture. There is also the feeling that he has always looked towards America.” The Guardian (UK) 09/18/01

Monday September 17

BOOK-BOUND: Fall is usually packed in the publishing business. But this fall will be different as publishers postpone releases. “Not just personally but professionally, everyone in the business has felt repercussions from Tuesday’s mayhem. Nobody would dare complain at a time like this, but sales will probably suffer as readers focus on other things for a while – among them reading’s old nemesis, television. Where people are finding time to buy and read books, nonfiction is predominating, as people struggle to learn more about how this could have happened.” San Francisco Chronicle 09/17/01

SHORT SHRIFT: “Canada must produce more short stories per capita than any other literary outpost in the galaxy, and the book reviewers of the nation are trembling under the weight.” So enough. Enough. Let’s call a ban on the genre. “The fact is our literature is at risk of becoming so small-boned, so petite, so lacking in ambition that it disappears up its own exquisite backside.” Saturday Night (Canada) 09/17/01

WHAT MEMORY BRINGS: Lily Brett is a writer with an international reputation based on her writing about a screwed up childhood. Her sister, writer Doris Brett, has just published a book disputing that childhood. “Is this a case of terminal sibling rivalry? A Helen Garner-like row over a writer exposing one side of shared private moments to the public gaze? A reflection of the way some children of survivors end up with their parents’ experience as a big part of their identity, and others don’t? Or an object lesson in the way truth is never absolute, and memory is at best a fuzzy reconstruction?” The Age (Melbourne) 09/17/01

Friday September 14

THE APPROPRIATE MOMENT: There are many books about the World Trade Center or terrorism. “The question, with books that might be applicable to the recent situation, is whether you pull them forward. Which books should you delay, and which books might have an opportunity because of what happened. It’s a question of finding the right and appropriate moment.” Inside.com 09/13/01

CRITICISM FOR TOO MUCH AND TOO GOOD: Joyce Carol Oates has just published her 94th book. “Her recent Oprah pick, We Were the Mulvaneys, was the author’s first No. 1 best seller and has sold 10 times more than any other book she’s written.” Yet she’s criticized by some for her prolific output. Newsweek 09/17/01

Thursday September 13

RETHINKING ONLINE BOOK-SELLING: Canadian book super-seller Chapters had 150,000 customers with $5 million worth of orders unfilled when the company decided to rethink its online selling operation. Now the site is relaunching. The biggest change? Axing online book reviews. “Buying independent reviews is costly and not helpful to customers – they are not responding. We don’t see additional activity. In fiction it’s perhaps useful to have a snippet of what the basic novel is about.” Toronto Star 09/12/01

FRENCH COURT RULES LES MIZ SEQUEL IS OK: “A French court denied a request by descendants of Victor Hugo to have a newly published sequel to Les Miserables pulled from bookstores on the grounds that it betrayed the spirit of the 19th-century classic. In its ruling, the Paris court said that Hugo, in his lifetime, had not wanted his descendants to exercise control over his literary legacy. The court cited Hugo as once saying he did not agree with the premise that ‘descendants by blood were also the heirs of the spirit’.” Nando Times 09/12/01

HIGH ON HIGH ART: The New Criterion is 20 years old. “It remains one of the liveliest and most controversial cultural journals in North America. To its many admirers, the monthly magazine is a brave defender of the beleaguered values of high art in a cultural environment poisoned by political correctness. To an equally large number of detractors, The New Criterion is the dour and dyspeptic voice of cultural reactionaries who inflexibly reject new developments in art.” National Post (Canada) 09/13/01

Wednesday September 12

STANDING IN FOR TWAIN: One thing all authors can agree on: book tours are no fun. So what to do about publicity when the author has been deceased for decades? In the case of the new Mark Twain story published recently by The Atlantic, humorist Roy Blount, Jr. has agreed to stand in for the author on the PR blitz. Boston Globe 09/12/01

PINNING DOWN WILDE: Oscar Wilde’s wide-ranging body of work has always defied attempts to pigeonhole the author’s legacy. Last year, the British Library presented an exhibition that attempted to capture the many faces of Wilde through manuscripts, letters, and critiques. A somewhat-revised version of “Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts” is scheduled to open in New York this weekend. The New York Times 09/12/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday September 11

BOOK COLLECTING AND THE ART OF INTERNET: Second-hand booksellers aren’t exactly hurting these days – if – they’re willing to adapt. The internet has radically changed the way book collectors collect. “It’s close to revolutionised what we do – not necessarily for the best.” The Age (Melbourne) 09/11/01

SEX AND THE BESTSELLER LIST: Michel Houellebecq’s books are nearly automatic bestsellers in France, full of graphic sexual imagery and scandalous exploits. But is it just the pornographic aspects that attract the public (even as critics and crusaders scream about degeneracy and smut,) or does Hoellebecq’s work have a higher value? The New York Times 09/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday September 10

CELEBRATING READING: US First Lady Laura Bush hosts the first National Book Festival in Washington. “Throughout Saturday’s free event some 25,000 folks moved from book signings to author presentations to readings by professional basketball players to booths on literacy programs to musical performances to misting machines to food stands to the library itself, across the East Lawn, for self-guided tours of its Great Hall.” Washington Post 09/10/01

GIVING IT AWAY INCREASES BOOK SALES: Most publishers are worried that online distribution of their books will kill their sales. But one publisher that has put everything it prints on the web finds that sales have actually increased. Why? “From our perspective, the Web is already the best dissemination engine ever, which has the side benefit of providing vast new markets and audiences for our work.” Chronicle of Higher Eductaion 09/14/01

PLACING PRODUCT: So why all the fuss over B-list novelist Fay Weldon’s product-placement deal in her latest book? “It’s much ado about absolutely nothing. The ‘sacred name of literature’ – whatever in God’s name that may be – hardly has been besmirched by Weldon’s little caper, nor has the ‘freedom of the writer to do as he pleases’ been compromised. Literature is a lot bigger than all the little people who claim to labor in its name, and it will survive the petty transgressions of them all.” Washington Post 09/10/01

NAME THAT CHARACTER: To raise money for a foundation that helps provide medical care for victims of torture, a group of writers is auctioning off literary immortality. “Writers Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Ken Follett, Robert Harris, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Terry Pratchett and Zadie Smith have all agreed to name a character in their forthcoming books after those prepared to pay most for the privilege.” BBC 09/10/01

COMMON READ: With citizens of Chicago all reading the same book (To Kill a Mockingbird) together (at least that’s the claim), other cities are trying to choose books of their own to read. Taste being what it is, agreeing on a book isn’t so easy. Toronto Star 09/09/01

Friday September 7

THE ART OF A BESTSELLER: A book review editor is reading an advance copy of a new book, when he notices the book has already scaled the Bestseller lists. How can this be? It’s all in the art of advance marketing a hot property. Christian Science Monitor 09/06/01

FIVE BOOKS SHORT-LISTED FOR GELBER PRIZE: Three biographies, a memoir of Russia, and a study of money are finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize. The $50,000 prize – world’s largest juried prize for non-fiction – was established “to promote the study of international affairs and to increase popular interest in foreign policy and politics.” CBC 09/06/01

Thursday September 6

REPEALING HOMEGROWN: For 20 years the British Columbia government had bought up to $150,000 worth of books by homegrown BC writers for each school in the province. Now the new Liberal government, looking for ways to save money, has canceled the program. CBC 09/05/01

WILL ANYONE USE A GREAT LIBRARY? Alexandria Egypt has spent the better part of two decades and $200 million building a library reminiscent of the city’s ancient fabled library. “But while no expense has been spared, the library’s cultural significance, and indeed its political prestige, appears lost on the vast majority of Egyptians, who have little interest in their country’s pre-Islamic past. The likelihood of their ever being able to use it seems, in spite of refutation, undeniably slim.” New Statesman 09/03/01

IRISH TIMES BOOK AWARDS: Ha Jin, Philip Roth, Denis Johnson, and Michael Ondaatje are on the short list for this year’s Irish Times International Fiction Prize, worth £7,500. The competition also has awards of £5,000 in each of four categories of Irish Literature. Winners will be announced in October. The Irish Times 09/06/01

ANOTHER MIDDLEMAN IN THE AUTHOR-TO-READER CHAIN: Not very many people seem to be buying e-books, but more and more people are getting ready to sell them. Latest to join the marketplace is Yahoo! Inc, which has signed contracts with Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins. Yahoo officials say it gives “publishers a neutral ground, so to speak, in which to sell their books, and allows them some direct contact with online buyers.” atnewyork.com 09/06/01

Wednesday September 5

ADOPT-A-BOOK: Do you long for the days when artists and writers were supported by their own personal impresarios, benevolent moneymen who bankrolled every new play, treatise, and opera that ever flowed from a visionary’s pen? Well, you’re in luck: “For amounts ranging from $250 to $50,000, book lovers can become art patrons — patrons of the art of literature. They can adopt a particular book by a particular favorite writer and guarantee that it will always stay in print. Or, like a literary Santa Claus, they can donate an entire set of great works at cut-rate prices to a school or library.” Chicago Tribune 09/05/01

Tuesday September 4

YOUR AD HERE: They do it in movies – why not in books? Product placement, that is. Why should it be just a plain jewelry store when it could be a Bulgari jewelry store? International Herald Tribune 09/04/01

FINALLY, A FOOT IN THE DOOR: The self-publishing boom has had an unexpected side benefit for one group of writers long underserved by the industry: “Random House, Ballantine, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Warner have all launched African-American imprints in the past couple of years, and dozens of the titles that they are issuing this fall were originally self-published.” Wired 09/04/01

GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Expectations couldn’t be higher for James Franzen’s new novel. So how are the reviews? “Though often self-indulgent and long- winded, the novel leaves the reader with both a devastating family portrait and a harrowing portrait of America in the late 1990’s — an America deep in the grip of that decade’s money madness and sick with envy, resentment, greed, acquisitiveness and self-delusion, an America committed to the quick-fix solution and determined to try to medicate its problems away. The New York Times 09/04/01 (one-time registration required for access)

WRITING FASTER THAN YOU CAN READ: A Vancouver publisher is sponsoring a writing competition, with the winner having her/his work published nationwide. The catch? All works submitted (and they must be full-length novels) must be written entirely in a single three-day period. National Post (Canada) 09/04/01