Category: words

Friday August 31

TO BUY A MOCKINGBIRD? “‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ the book chosen by the Chicago Public Library for all Chicagoans to read in September and early October, is moving up the best-seller lists at two major Internet bookstores. Amazon.com reported that the mass market paperback edition of ‘Mockingbird’ jumped Wednesday to 67th on its best-seller list from a ranking the day before of 324th, out of more than 2 million titles carried by the company. Meanwhile, at Barnes&Noble.com, that same edition of ‘Mockingbird’ held 63rd place out of more than a million titles in the store’s inventory.” Chicago Tribune 08/31/01

Thursday August 30

ANY BOOK FOR FREE: Napster-type programs now make downloading books easy and free. “It took a National Post reporter 30 minutes to navigate Gnutella, find Stephen King’s 1984 work Thinner on the network and download the novel. Printing the book required another 15 minutes. In addition to best-sellers written by such authors as King and Rowling, the most widely pirated books online are science fiction novels and computer manuals.” National Post 08/30/01

REMEMBERING DAME EDNA: She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and one of the few who made a lot of money from it. Admirers, editors, and lovers lined up for her. She was a stunning, charismatic figure once regarded as a giant of American letters. Today she’s nearly forgotten, a footnote. A couple of new biographies attempt to revive her reputation. The New York Times 08/30/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday August 29

BAD HISTORY: Five years ago a prize was set up in Australia for outstanding history-writing for kids. Trouble is, for the second time in five years the jury has declined to name even a shortlist of finalists for the prize, saying no books met the standard of excellence and that “many of the works were mired in a monocultural vision of Australia.” So why is this so hard? Sydney Morning Herald 08/29/01

E-BOOK HACKER INDICTED: “A Russian computer programmer and his employer were indicted Tuesday on charges of violating digital copyright protections. Dmitry Sklyarov and ElComSoft Co. Ltd. were charged for writing a program that lets users of Adobe Systems’ eBook Reader get around copyright protections imposed by electronic-book publishers. The indictment was the first under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids technology that circumvents copyright protections.” Salon 08/29/01

Tuesday August 28

ONE BOOK AT A TIME: Officials of the city of Chicago are trying to the the whole city to read the same book at the same time. And the book? Harper Lee’s 1961 classic To Kill a Mockingbird. “Libraries throughout the city have braced for an onslaught by putting more than 4,000 copies of the book on their shelves, including Spanish and Polish translations. Bookstores reported sharp increases in sales even before the seven-week project was officially begun on Saturday.” The New York Times 08/28/01 (one-time registration required for access)

READING THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN MARKET: For decades, large publishing houses in the US paid scant attention to the interests of African-American readers. Then in 1992, everything just changed. That year, Terry MacMillan published Waiting to Exhale, and for a time, she, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were simultaneously top-selling authors.” Since then “seven publishing imprints dedicated to books by black authors have been created or revived by major publishing houses.” Christian Science Monitor 08/28/01

THE NEXT BIG THING GUY: Jonathan Franzen is being set up by the publishing establishment as literature’s Next Big Thing. In the run-up to his next book, the New York Times Magazine is publishing an excerpt this weekend, he’s got an essay in the next New Yorker, and the film rights were just auctioned off for a ton of money. “So would it make a difference if someone told you that Franzen isn’t just another self-conscious young author with a hip, po-mo sensibility; that he is an assured, seriously funny writer with a generosity and breadth of vision unusual for his generation?” The Globe & Mail (Canada0 08/28/01

Monday August 27

DEFINING THE READER: Is being a reader cool? Nah – “It’s like being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world.” Washington Post 08/26/01

Friday August 24

WHAT’S WITH THE CHICK LIT? Booker Prize favorite author Beryl Bainbridge blasts the current “chick lit” genre of the Bridget Jones variety. “It’s a pity that so many young women are writing like that. I wonder if they are just writing like this because they think they are going to get published.” The Age (Melbourne) 08/24/01

Thursday August 23

DOWNLOADABLE READING: E-pirates are ripping off books online. “More than 7,000 copyrighted books are available for free on the Internet, including works by J.K. Rowling, John Grisham and Stephen King.” CBC 08/22/01

WHO RULES PUBLISHING: It’s simplistic yes, but “there are a handful of people whose influence affects your reading choices in ways you never would’ve guessed. Each of them, to some degree, represents his or her peers. But among the blockbuster authors who help support entire publishing houses, powerful literary agents who fight tooth and nail for their clients’ deals, Hollywood moguls who often bring us back to the books from which they made their hits and gatekeepers you’ve probably never heard of,” there is a small group of such powerful publishing figures. Book Magazine 08/01

Wednesday August 22

NY PUBLIC LIBRARY GETS KEROUAC: The New York Public Library has acquired Jack Kerouac’s literary and personal archive. “The archive, the largest Kerouac holding in any institution, contains manuscripts, notebooks, letters, journals and personal items saved from the time he was 11 until his death at 47 in 1969.” The New York Times 08/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

PENGUIN THINKS E-BOOKS WILL BE COOL: Even Stephen King hasn’t succeeded with e-publishing his novels, but book publisher Penguin is giving it a try anyway. Some 200 titles, including Jane Austen’s Emma, will be available at the Penguin site. Often lost in the debates over the feasibility of e-books is that old-timer (in Internet terms) Project Gutenberg, which offers free downloads of thousands of public domain works, including Jane Austen’s Emma. The Guardian (UK) 08/21/01

Tuesday August 21

HIT THE ROAD JACK: “Two decades ago, the author book tour was almost a novelty. Today it can be the deciding factor in a book’s success. Touring has always been as much about selling the author as the book. Turn the author into a traveling salesman, and those personal appearances generate real sales—important when a few thousand books can make a best seller—not to mention media attention on local radio and television and reviews in the local press.” Newsweek 08/27/01

SLIPPERY SLOPE? The California State University system has struck a deal with an e-publisher to offer multiple copies of electronic books at one time. “Previously, a single copy of an e-book bought for an electronic-library could only be borrowed by one reader at a time – just like a print book. But an the arrangement with NetLibrary, half of the 1,500 e-books Cal State has purchased – at no additional cost – will have unrestricted use for multiple borrowers.” Wired 08/21/01

Monday August 20

INDEPENDENT’S DAY: While Canadian book superstore Chapters has been mired in financial difficulties, and independent bookstores have been closing at a frightening pace, one Toronto independent is thriving. “Next month Book City celebrates 25 years in business with five branches around Toronto employing 71 staff, that move approximately 800,000 books and magazines annually.” Toronto Star 08/18/01

POLITICS OF LITERATURE (AND CRITICISM): Why do we get the literature we get today? “A lot of today’s ‘literary’ writing is repetitious, inexact, dull and clichéd. It is also highly formulaic, as witness the success of overblown nurse novels like Cold Mountain and The English Patient. But the most important point . . . has to do with the failure of the critical establishment. How can one explain reviewers gushing over trash it’s hard to believe they’ve even read? Why do literary awards so often go to pretentious pulp?” Good Reports 08/18/01

Sunday August 19

ALL ABOUT ME: For years the British publishing market has been dominated by the memoir. “But there’s a growing feeling that the memoir’s hold on the literary market place has had a damaging effect on adjacent genres. Pieces of prose that in the 1980s would have been sent out into the world as novels have more recently been packaged as the Story of Me.” The Observer (UK) 08/19/01

QUEEN OF LETTERS: Felicia Ackerman, a professor of philosophy at Brown University, is a NYTimes letters junkie. “Since 1991, the Times has published seventy-four of her epistles, including six so far this year. And were it not for the Times’s notorious stringency, readers would see far more of Ackerman: She estimates that for every letter that runs, she’s written three or four others.” Lingua Franca 09/01

Friday August 17

PRETENSIONS TO QUALITY? Are American literary writers too full of themselves? Do they fail to make sense? Are American readers “gullible morons” who don’t know good from bad? The debate is joined. The Guardian (UK) 08/16/01

BOOKING OUT: A Saskatchewan library is looking to give away half of its collection – about 100,000 books – and in the meantime is shipping the books to a warehouse thousands of miles away. “The Chief Librarian says circulation has dropped from 150,000 books per year to just 5,000.” CBC 08/16/01

REAL KIDS’ PLAY: The Children’s Book Council of Australia is announcing this year’s children’s literature awards. “Loss, betrayal, death, racism, violence and fear are common issues in this year’s list of winners.” The Age (Melbourne) 08/17/01

Thursday August 16

BOOKER LONGLIST: For the first time ever, the longlist of finalists for the Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award, has been made public. Booker officials “believe revealing the longlist will put an end to speculation over how it is compiled.” The Guardian (UK) 08/15/01

• BOOKER NOMINEES: Here’s a complete list of the 24 nominees for this year’s Booker Prize. Toronto Star 08/15/01
• HANDICAPPING THE B’r: Beryl Bainbridge is the bookmakers’ favourite for the Booker. BBC 08/16/01

…AND NE’ER (WELL, SELDOM) THE TWAIN SHALL MEET: Why don’t literary novels appeal to more readers, the way genre novels do? They aren’t intended to, because “people who write serious fiction seek the high opinion of other literary novelists, of creative writing teachers and of reviewers and critics. They want very badly to be ‘literary,’ and for many of them this means avoiding techniques associated with commercial and genre fiction.” Salon 08/16/01

• Previously: WHAT’S WRONG WITH TODAY’S FICTION? BR Myers writes in the current Atlantic Monthly that stars of the contemporary writing establishment have lost their way [the piece is not online]. Critic Jonathan Yardley heartily agrees: “Myers looks back, as I too most certainly do, ‘to a time when authors had more to say than ‘I’m a writer!’; when the novel wasn’t just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket.’ He notes with dismay the disdain in which such fiction is now held in proper literary circles, where the pretentious display of self-consciously ‘writerly’ prose is valued while plot, narrative and character are scorned.” Washington Post 07/02/01

ANGELA’S COATTAILS: Jacket blurbs – those sound-bite-sized endorsements writers give one another for publicity – actually can boost sales of a book. That’s particularly true if the blurber is well-known, or has recently had a very successful book. One of the best and most prolific is Frank McCourt, who blurbs at the rate of half a dozen a year. Slate 08/13/01

Wednesday August 15

LIKE THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT: The real China is enormous, complex, and elusive; writers tackle it at their peril. “Chinese authors who went into exile dominate perceptions of Chinese literature in western markets, but are largely ignored in China itself. Writers in China accuse the exiles of pandering to western fantasies.” The Economist 08/09/01

“REALITY TV” IS RUINING NOVELS, TOO: One of Britain’s leading novelists complains that “The vogue for confessional novels, and the pressure on writers to sell their work with some tantalising revelation from their personal lives, is killing serious fiction. The trend toward a culture of ‘de-fictionalisation’, driven partly by the mania for reality TV, [is] cheapening the art of the novel.” The Guardian (UK) 08/13/01

Tuesday August 14

SELF-PUBLISHING INCREASE: Prices of on-demand self-published books are going up – as much as 30 percent. Authors aren’t so concerned about changes in their royalties as they are that higher prices will mean fewer buyers. Wired 08/14/01

Monday August 13

THIS BOOK WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN… E-books are still a tough sell. But one publisher has an idea to sell electronic books and save it from being copied. RosettaBooks will sell a timed copy of an Agatha Christie book – $1 buys you twn hours of reading until the book is automatically erased. Planet eBook 08/10/01

Friday August 10

READING NATION: Australia’s book publishers sold 126 million books worth $1.2 billion last year. That total was a 13 percent increase over 1997/98. The Age (Melbourne) 08/10/01

NEXT HARRY: JK Rowling denies writer’s block. “There is no writer’s block; on the contrary, I am writing away very happily. I made it clear last summer that I wanted to take the time to make sure that book five was not dashed off to meet a deadline, but was completed to my full satisfaction as its predecessors have been.” New Zealand Herald 08/08/01

Thursday August 9

HOPING FOR A NEW HARRY: Is JK Rowling suffering from writer’s block? There’s been no new Harry Potter installment this year, but “the previous four books were produced once a year since 1997.” BBC 08/09/02

THE CHANGING POST: Making fun of the New York Post, with its exuberant headlines and slavish devotion to celebrity has long been a New York tradition. The Post “showed up on newsstands each morning representing a coherent whole — reflecting and defining, in its own unique way, how the city saw itself.” Now, with a new editor, it “looks and feels a little like a giant prawn out of water: foreign, a little disoriented, not quite the defining homegrown newspaper it was.” New York Observer 08/09/01

Wednesday August 8

20 YEARS OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Sure, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie are important writers. So are Ian McEwan Julian Barnes. But those four have dominated the British literary scene since the seventies. Are there no new voices coming along, or are readers – and editors – too lazy to find them? The Guardian (UK) 08/06/01

CONRAD, DINESEN, HEMINGWAY. THEY DID NOT KNOW AFRICA: But what writer does? Toni Morrison thinks Camara Laye does, in The Radiance of the King. In it, he “not only summoned a sophisticated, wholly African imagistic vocabulary in which to launch a discursive negotiation with the West, he exploited with technical finesse the very images that have served white writers for generations.” New York Review of Books 08/09/01

JORGE AMADO, 88: Jorge Amado was Brazil’s most popular and most successful novelist; his 32 books have sold millions of copies in more than 40 languages. Perhaps his best known – at home and abroad – was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sold two million copies in Brazil alone. Amado had been in ill health for several years. The New York Times 08/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

POETRY CON: Ravi Desai pledged millions of dollars for poetry programs at major American universities. But after fanfare over the gifts died down, Desai failed to come through with the money. “Most business cons are for riches. This was a con whose payoff was to rub shoulders with poets. What did he gain, except for an engraved ax?” Poets & Writers 08/01/01

Tuesday August 7

NO OLD WORDS: Is it more difficult for older writers to get published? Even long-established writers are having difficulty. “I think it is virtually impossible now for any novelist over the age of 30 to get published. Publishers are not interested because their editors are all aged about 12 and they only want books by girls in their twenties, particularly if they are pretty.” The Times (UK) 08/07/01

POETRY AND THE SEX SCANDAL: England’s poet laureate is usually a pretty safe choice, a feel-good appointment to promote poetry and not meant to push boundaries or provoke controversy. But then a student accused the current poet laureate of sexual harassment and – “oh dear. A sex scandal. Well, nearly a sex scandal. All right, a scandal about sex but with no sex. Certainly no Blue Dress. Please.” Salon 08/07/01

THAT’LL LEARN THEM YANKEE SNOBS: “On Saturday in Seattle, a team of four Dallas poets won the 12th annual National Poetry Slam before a sold-out audience in the 2,000-seat Paramount Theatre. It was the first time a Texas team ever won the publicly judged contest of spoken poetry, taking away bragging rights, a trophy and $2,000 in prize money.” Dallas Morning News 08/07/01

FINDING A NICHE FOR TEENS: Bookstores have a distinctly adult feel to them these days – coffee bars, endless magazine racks, and entire sections devoted to memoirs of retired New Yorker writers do not exactly bring in droves of adolescents, and most stores seem to like it that way. But there is still a thriving market for the “Young Adult” book, and it is centered online, where teens can not only buy the latest titles, but discuss them in open forums. Wired 08/07/01

COULD SOMEONE FETCH MR. CLINTON $10 MIL? “Former President Clinton has agreed to write his memoirs for Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher announced Monday, in a deal expected to involve one of the biggest advances ever for a nonfiction book. The book is expected to be out in 2003.” Ottawa Citizen (AP) 08/06/01

Monday August 6

LETTERS SPECULATE ON PLATH’S DEATH: “”A set of unpublished letters written by the late former poet laureate Ted Hughes – including one blaming anti-depressants for Sylvia Plath’s suicide – have been acquired by the British Library. The collection of over 140 letters and other documents were written to literary critic, biographer and friend of Hughes, Keith Sagar, over a period of nearly 30 years.” BBC 08/06/01

RESEARCHING THE OBVIOUS:As publishers have poured more and more money into the development of what everyone hopes will eventually be the lucrative e-book market, the public has reacted with marked indifference. Publishers, naturally, would like to know why this is. So far, the evidence seems to point to the good old-fashioned comfort factor of holding a real, bound, pages-and-glue book in one’s hands, and knowing that it will never require a call to technical support. Boston Globe 08/06/01

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: The city of Chicago is launching a program designed to get everyone in the city to read the same book at the same time, in an effort to promote reading and literacy. Mayor Richard Daley has selected his favorite book, Harper Lee’s classic To Kill A Mockingbird, for the program. Trouble is, Mockingbird is not the sweet, syrupy days-of-yesteryear tome that many adults choose to remember, and in today’s ultra-charged climate of racial politics, some are worried that the book’s language and style may offend.Chicago Tribune 08/06/01

READING IS BELIEVING:Victor Hugo is widely considered to be the greatest French poet of the 19th century by scholars and lay readers alike. But aside from repeated viewings of the musical version of Les Miserables, most English speakers have never had much of a chance to judge Hugo’s work for themselves, most of his work having never been well-translated. A new collection aims to change all that.The Weekly Standard 08/06/01

Sunday August 5

UNUSUAL DEMOGRAPHICS: A new women’s magazine has begun publication in the Netherlands. Mainline Lady has all the hallmarks of glossy rags like Cosmo and Vogue, but with a distinct marketing and content twist: the new publication is aimed at heroin addicts. Really. And it’s backed by the national health ministry. Seriously. And the editors don’t sound particularly eager for their readers to kick their deadly habit. The Age (Melbourne) 08/05/01

Friday August 3

PRICE OF POPULARITY: As African American literature goes mainstream, some questions: “Whom do black authors write for, and who should our audience be? Will the imprints of the major houses—newly geared up to reach a broad black readership—release mediocre work and ghettoize the literary marketplace, or will they prove a boon for black voices?” Village Voice 08/01/01

Thursday August 2

EXPERIMENTAL NON-FICTION? SOUNDS ODD: It is odd, in the sense that it’s uncommon and defies categorization. Much of it is gathered under the hazy rubric “creative non-fiction,” popular in college writing programs. “It is an academic refashioning of what used to be New Journalism, that explosion of journalistic self-confidence… Universities report that more than 70% of people studying creative non-fiction want to write autobiography.” The Guardian (UK) 07/28/01

• Previously: ABOUT ONE’S SELF: “The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement towards it – that counts.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/30/01

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, MOVIN’ ON: “For as long as people have been writing about their journeys, they have been telling tales of the strange and the wondrous… The names of places change, the conveyances become faster, the duration of the journey grows briefer – but the most accomplished travel writers know that the stories they tell follow the same patterns as did the stories heard or read centuries before, the stories that made them leave home in the first place.” The New Republic 08/01/01

WHODUNIT? IT MAY HAVE BEEN THE AUTHOR: Those people running around in deerstalker hats smoking pipes in Dartmoor this week were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, arguably the best-known Sherlock Holmes story. But did Conan Doyle even write the story? A historian charges that Doyle stole the story from his lover’s husband, then helped kill the man to cover his tracks. If nothing else, it would make a good mystery story. BBC 08/02/01

Wednesday August 1

HOW TO WRITE: You see them in every bookstore, those books that promise to teach you how to write. “Evidently there exists a widespread belief that the good ol’ Yankee can-do spirit – the kind that helps you to learn how to puff a soufflé or lay a garden path – extends to an imaginative realm like novel-writing.” If only it were so easy… Opinion Journal 07/27/01

HOLDEN CAULFIELD TURNS 50. DON’T YOU FEEL OLD? “It was 50 years ago that J.D. Salinger first published Catcher in the Rye and ever since, people have been calling the book’s narrator, Holden Caulfield, their hero. Reading about Holden’s three-day “madman” odyssey in New York City has changed people’s lives. They’ve identified with his struggles and his longing for the innocence of youth. But the book was published in a different time, when the nature of innocence was a very different thing.” National Post (Canada) 08/01/01

Tuesday July 31

PENNY PINCHING: Just how bad are Canadian book superstore Indigo/Chapters’ finances? The company has pulled its annual sponsorship of this year’s Word on the Street literary festival, held in four cities. CBC 07/30/01

CLASSIC IGNORANCE: the absence of classical studies from contemporary education is a bad thing, and it is time to argue that they should be restored to a more salient place in the curriculum. Western culture is so deeply imbued with its classical origins that a proper appreciation of it is impossible without some knowledge of these origins.” New Statesman 07/30/01

ABOUT ONE’S SELF: “The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement towards it – that counts.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/30/01

HUGHES ANTHOLOGY COMING: “[T]he University of Missouri Press is placing a claim on its native son by publishing for the first time the complete ‘Collected Works of Langston Hughes’ in 18 volumes. The first three volumes were published in June. The entire set will be available in time for the centenary of his birth, Feb. 1, 2002.” The New York Times 07/31/01 (one-time registration required for access)

STILL GOING STRONG: “Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the arsenic-and-old-lace school of whodunits. Modern mystery writers rarely praise her or cite her work as an influence. She is not as writerly as Dorothy Sayers or Robert Goddard, and her plots – often unfairly lumped together – seem to boil down to ‘Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the drawing room.’ But in Great Britain she remains the best-selling writer of all time, save for one William Shakespeare and God Herself, author of the Bible.” Boston Globe 07/31/01

Monday July 30

THE AMAZON PROBLEM: “The reason people my age are not ordering more books on-line may have a purely mathematical explanation. The number of books that we own, but have not yet read, and the number of years we might reasonably expect to have left to read them, do not quite add up.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/30/01

Sunday July 29

TOP SHELF: Want to get bookstore shelf space for that book you’re writing? Managers of the book retailer WH Smith have some advice: “Jacket design and presentation matter in the modern book market as they never have before. Publishers used to use jacket design to denote their own particular brand, in the way that Penguin still do with their Classics series. These days, though, jacket design is more likely to identify the genre than the publisher.” The Observer (UK) 07/29/01

Friday July 27

BLACK NOVELISTS HITTING THE BEST-SELLER LIST:“African-Americans buy books that are relevant to their experience in greater numbers than have ever been imagined by most publishers. It also appears that book consumers are becoming more sophisticated, that they want a good yarn well told, and that’s more important than whether the characters are black or white. So there’s more and more crossover readership.” The New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE FIRST INFO AGE: The digital revolution of the Information Age is changing the way we communicate and transmit information. But arguably the first “Information Age” was more than two millennia ago with the establishment of the great ancient libraries… International Herald Tribune 07/26/01

IT’S STORY TIME. BRING YOUR OWN LAWYER: The intellectual rights arguments have centered lately on e-books and Napster, but the next arena may be your friendly neighborhood public library. Libraries see the digital rights revolution as a limitation on their ability to serve the public; publishers see it as an intrusion on their copyrighted material. “As the two sides circle each other warily, each is awaiting guidance from that long-delayed Copyright Office study.” Time 07/24/01

REYNOLDS PRICE, ON EUDORA WELTY: “Her main pleasure toward the end was the company of her friends. Surprisingly, for one whose work is so marked by the keen double knife-edge of satire and remorseless honesty, she was treated as the genial and polite Honorary Maiden Aunt of American letters. No other maiden aunt in history can have been, in her heart, less a maiden and less like the greeting-card aunt of one’s dreams. To almost the end, Eudora Welty was both a fierce observer of the wide world around her and its loving consumer.” The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE CHIEF LEGAL COUNSEL DONE GONE: As chief legal counsel for CNN, Eve Burton joined The New York Times and Dow Jones filing a brief in support of a recent Houghton Mifflin book, The Wind Done Gone. However, AOL-TimeWarner, which owns CNN, has come out in opposition to publication of the book. Eve Burton is now the former chief legal counsel for CNN, and the network’s staffers aren’t happy about it. The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

DEPRESSION CAN BE, WELL, DEPRESSING: Being published to high critical praise and still being unknown might affect your outlook, as seems to be the case with novelist Hugh Nissenson, who has battled severe depression throughout his career. His latest work is a tale of an artist who has had his destiny forced upon him by a world that confuses technology with humanity. The New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday July 26

THE ILIAD FOR REAL? An expert on ancient Greece “combines archeological evidence with hypotheses from various disciplines and attempts to prove that Homer’s Iliad was not the product of one man’s poetic imagination, inspired in the eighth century B.C. by a few mysterious ruins from the dim and distant past.” Instead, he claims it is “the first written record of an unbroken chain of oral tradition passed down in hexameters, preserving the memory of a historical Trojan war that occurred during the Bronze Age.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 07/26/01

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME: In the age of Amazon, Borders, Chapters, and other chain book superstores, consumers have become trapped between their desire to support local independents, and their desire to find the book they want, in stock, right now. Author Larry McMurtry is hoping to create the best of both worlds when he opens his store in Archer City, Texas: “Booked Up” will contain hundreds of thousands of books, all hand-picked for quality, and will have a decidedly independent flavor. National Post (Canada) 07/26/01

BEAUTIFUL WRITERS WANTED, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY: “Increasingly often, it would seem, attractive young writers are offered huge advances for their books. Publishing today seems to be as much about who you are, as what you write. But where does that leave older writers?” BBC 07/26/01

Wednesday July 25

AOL COULD BUY AMAZON: “AOL Time Warner would be allowed to propose a takeover bid for Amazon.com — as long as it did so quietly — under the terms of a $100 million investment AOL made in Amazon Monday. According to records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and reported by Dow Jones Newswires, AOL could propose a buyout, but not publicly and not without the approval of Amazon.com.” The New York Times (AP) 07/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday July 24

EUDORA WELTY, 92: “She was one of the finest Southern writers of the 20th century. She could be as obscure as William Faulkner. As violent as Flannery O’Connor. As incisive as Richard Wright. But more genteel and straightforward than just about anyone. And at 92 she outlived them all.” Washington Post 07/24/01

Monday July 23

BEST-WHAT? Does anybody really pay attention to Bestseller lists? “Nowadays a ‘bestseller’ is more normally one of three things: a how–to — usually, either about how to more efficiently grub for money or how to lose weight while eating without pause; a memoir by somebody really despicable; or a barely literate thriller where gruesome things happen to people while they’re having sex just after drinking brand–name beverages.” MobyLives 07/23/01

TYPECASTING: Why do books have to conform to a genre, to be assigned to a category? “Surely a piece of writing ought to be allowed to convey its own generic intentions, and surely readers can be expected to divine them without help?” Poets & Writers 07/01

Sunday July 22ENGLAND AS A STATE OF MIND: George Orwell railed against the mid-20th-century obsession with utopias. But ironically, “he appears today – more than 50 years after his death – as one of the most persuasively utopian writers who ever put pen to paper.” Financial Times 07/20/01

Thursday July 19

THE BANISHING BOOKS: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe “have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation’s most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages.” Do the papers think no one cares about reading about books? Salon 07/19/01

FBI ARRESTS RUSSIAN FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov, “one of the authors of a software package released in June that breaks through e-book encryption developed by Adobe Systems,” was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with violating copyright law. In Sklyarov’s defense, the head of his company claims that “distributing Adobe’s eBook software is illegal in Russia, since Russian law requires that the software permit the purchaser to make at least one legal copy.” International Herald Tribune & Electronic Frontier Foundation 07/18/01

THE PEN MAY NOT BE MIGHTIER THAN MEMORY OF THE SWORD: The new book Ghost Soldiers, about the rescue of US prisoners being tortured by Japanese during WW2, is a best seller in the US. In Japan, the book is a pawn in “the tug-of-war between intellectuals and internationalists who want Japan to own up to savage incidents by its army, and nationalists and bureaucrats who seek to protect the national psyche.” Japan Today 07/19/01

Wednesday July 18

E-OWNERSHIP: Publisher Random House is appealing last week’s court ruling that said the publisher did not own e-book rights to books it publishes on paper. “To demonstrate its confidence in its position, Random House simultaneously announced that it would soon be releasing e-book versions of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, as well as nine Raymond Chandler novels.” Inside.com 07/18/01

FOR THE LOVE OF LEARNING: It’s assumed today that the great working class masses have little use for literature and intellectual pursuits. A new book suggests that wasn’t always the case. A century ago “the working-class pursuit of education was not an accommodation to middle-class values, a capitulation to bourgeois cultural hegemony. Instead, it represented the return of the repressed in a society where the slogan ‘knowledge is power’ was passionately embraced by generations of working-class radicals who were denied both.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/16/01

Tuesday July 17

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, UP IN THE TOWER AND DOWN IN THE MINES: We know what people in the ivory tower want to read, but how about the – ahem – working classes? Apparently they’d choose “exactly the same Great Books to canonise, from the Odyssey to Dickens. Indeed, on the evidence of the borrowing records from Welsh miners’ libraries, the only books that no one wants to read are the works of the literary modernists.” The Guardian (UK) 07/14/01

IT’LL BE A BEST-SELLER. NO, MAYBE IT WON’T. BUT ON THE OTHER HAND… One of the mystic joys, and constant frustrations, of book publishing is that “it’s a business used to operating in the dark. It’s the only business I know of in which market research is virtually nonexistent. Every newspaper reader knows that A.I. sold $30 million in tickets the weekend it opened. Magazines are audited; television shows get Nielsen ratings. Why not put the book business on a realistic footing?” The New York Times 07/17/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOLDEN CAULFIELD ON SOCIAL SECURITY: Holden Caulfield is 66, an age not often considered a landmark. But that means Catcher in the Rye is now 50, which is a landmark. Holden seems to be holding up well; a quarter-million copies of the book are sold every year. We guess that’s good news for the author, J D Salinger, but he’s not the sort to talk much. USA Today & The Guardian (UK) 07/16/01

Monday July 16

CS LEWIS – MASTER FRAUD? A new book about C.S. Lewis “contends that several literary and theological works attributed to the British author are, in fact, the product of systematic forgery. Her arguments are well-known in Lewisian circles, where they have provoked intense scholarly discussion, not to mention a certain amount of litigation.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/16/01

• THE THREE FACES OF CS: Lewis was a prolific author, publishing 40 books. “Indeed, his published output sometimes appears to be the work of at least three different authors.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/16/01

THE TALE OF TINA AND HARRY: It’s not long ago that Tina Brown and Harry Evans were the power literary couple in New York, she running The New Yorker, he steering the fates of Random House. A new book that hit bookshelves this weekend chronicles the couple’s rise to power: “they emerge from the book as a couple so consumed by the naked ambition of the American arriviste, and so willing to consume others as fuel for their flight, that their crash from the heights of the sun became inevitable.” National Post (Canada) 07/16/01

LOOKING GOOD: “Are an author’s looks alone worthy of a half-million dolllar advance? Do people really buy books — or magazines — because the authors are young and skinny and resemble movie stars? Well, they may get what they pay for if they do…MobyLives 07/16/01

Friday July 13

FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS AUTHORS RETAIN E-BOOK RIGHTS: Citing “myriad differences between traditional book publishing and publishing in digital form,” a US District Court judge has ruled, in effect, that Rosetta Books is free to issue in e-book form works by William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut. Random House, which holds publication rights to the two authors, had asked for an injunction against Rosetta. The ruling has potential for wide impact in the publishing industry. New York Law Journal 07/12/01

• Previously: E-BOOKS LAWSUIT: “Authors and agents say what’s at stake in the upcoming lawsuit over interpretation of book contracts is the entire future of the electronic publishing industry. In Random House v. Rosettabooks…Random House alleges it owns the electronic titles based on a clause in the author’s original contracts that gives the publisher the right to ‘print, publish and sell in book form.” Wired 04/17/01

THE ILIAD – TOO BORING? A British lottery-funded project to donate a library of classic Great Books worth £3,000 to every school in he country has hit an unexpected snag. Eleven schools have refused the gift on the grounds that the books are either too difficult or too boring. “One Edinburgh teacher complained publicly that an early title, by the Greek historian Herodotus, was ‘far too boring’.” The Guardian (UK) 07/13/01

DEFENDING THE WIND: Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone will show up on The New York Times bestseller list this weekend. This week she made an appearance at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and got into an argument with an African American member of the audience who tried to dispute Randall’s assertion of Mitchell’s racism. Randall shouted at the woman: “My own mother was damaged by this book and has all kinds of problems with racial identity. You are my example of another generation of black women damaged by Gone With the Wind!” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 07/13/01

Thursday July 12

BUY AUSSIE: “Between July 1988 and last December, Australians paid about 44 per cent more for fiction paperbacks than US readers and about 9 per cent more than British readers.” But proposed legislation to allow the free importing of books is opposed by much of the Aussie book industry. Wonder why? Sydney Morning Herald 07/12/01

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION: Modern novelists seem to have lost – or quickly to lose – the basic skill of telling a common story to common readers. When good story-tellers become successful, their work “becomes thinner and thinner, more and more calculated to appeal to that narrow and treacherous audience of critics, booksellers, publicists and partygoers.” The Guardian (UK) 07/08/01

BOOKS – THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR GROWN-UPS ANY MORE: Know what kids are doing more of these days? No, besides that. They’re reading. A new study shows them reading more than a book a month, on average, and “minority teens may be reading the most of all.” One of the books they’re reading may be the old sword and sorcery stand-by Lord of the Rings. Sales of Tolkien’s classic are four times what they were last year, probably because of hype for the movie, which is not due out for another five months. Inside.com & Nando Times 07/11/01

“MP3” IS OFFICIALLY A WORD. “RUOK” MAY BE NEXT: The latest revision of the Concise Oxford Dictionary includes – and thereby recognizes as words – “e-book” and “MP3” and “i-Mode.” It also includes – so far only in a separate appendix – abbreviations used in mobile-phone text messages, and smiley-face emoticons. Salon 07/11/01

SHORT LIST FOR FORWARD PRIZE: Five poets have been short-listed for the Forward £10,000 “Best Collection” poetry prize, largest of its kind in Britain: Anne Carson, Douglas Dunn, Matthew Francis, James Lasdun, and Sean O’Brien. Ten others are on “Best First Collection” and “Best Single Poem” lists, with smaller prizes. The Guardian (UK)

A CHAPTER OF ULYSSES FOR $1.2 MILLION: James Joyce’s multi-colored hand manuscript of the “Eumaus” chapter of Ulysses was auctioned at Sotheby’s for £861,250 ($1,216,360). That was less than had been projected, based on last December’s sale of another draft chapter, which went for $1.5 million. The Guardian (UK) 07/10/01

Wednesday July 11

THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THAT GUY FROM MARKETING: With the success of the Harry Potter franchise, the folks who hold the rights to C.S. Lewis’s classic “Narnia” series have begun to think about new ways of marketing the series, which is filled with magic and Christian imagery. But fans of Aslan and the White Witch are appalled at what they see as a naked effort to strip the “Narnia” books of their childish charm and to remove as much of the religion as possible. Minneapolis Star Tribune (NYT News Service) 07/11/01

NEW WORK FROM AN OLD DISSIDENT: “Along with other secrets about spies and agents and assassinations and conspiracies, the archives of the former Soviet Union may contain a literary secret: an unpublished novel by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. Babel, the author of the ‘Red Cavalry’ stories and ‘Odessa Tales,’ was arrested in 1939 and executed in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1940.” The New York Times 07/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

POETIC OBSCURITY: The collapse of American poetry into the black hole of academic obscurity is a process that has been occurring for half a century. At the beginning of the 21st century, the contrast between the relative health of poetry in Britain and its dire condition in the US is striking.” Prospect 07/01

TOUGH E-SELL: “For a variety of reasons, some of journalism’s biggest names are entering the e-book market.” But publishers are finding it tough to make money from any of the books. Publishers Weekly 07/10/01

75 OF THE WORST WORDS EVER WRITTEN: The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which honors (intentionally) bad writing, is a 44-year-old secretary from Vancouver with what appears to be a fixation on small, yappy dogs. In keeping with the style of winners from past years, the winning entry is a ridiculous run-on sentence with more indecipherable metaphor than you can shake a stick at. Cleveland Plain Dealer 07/11/01

Tuesday July 10

MISSING HARRY: Barnes & Noble reports its sales are up 4.2 percent over last year for the first part of this year. But “although book sales are running well ahead of Street estimates for the quarter to date, the unfavorable comparison to last year’s Harry Potter phenomenon is expected to produce negative comparable sales for the month of July.” The New York Times 07/10/01 (one-time registration required for access)

MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING. RELATIVELY SPEAKING, THAT IS: She’s written only one story. Must have been a good one; The New Yorker published it. Book publishers started throwing money at her – $500,000, in one case. She turned down the half million, and accepted a $100,000 offer from Ecco Press, which publishes such luminaries as Edmund White and Czeslaw Milosz. Inside.com 07/09/01

REALLY GOOD BAD WRITING IS AN ART: Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest “honours the writer who comes up with the worst beginning to an imaginary novel.” This year’s winning entry describes Desdemona, who decides “(as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.”

Sunday July 8

SO, UM, MADONNA’S A POET? Ever since rock music began to get all heavy back in the protest era of the 1960s, the question of whether the lyrics of some songs can be counted as poetry has troubled musicians and poets alike. Norman Mailer says no, but the Beatles said yes, and these days, as poetry continues to experience an extended boom, the musicians may have won the argument simply by outlasting the naysayers. The New York Times 07/08/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday July 6

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL: If someone had described today’s book superstores 20 years ago, most book lovers would have thought it was a vision of utopia – long hours, tons of books, comfortable surroundings. So “why, then, the chorus of disapproval from the cultural elite? Why the characterization, spread by a vocal group of critics, of the chain bookstores as a sort of intellectual McDonald’s, a symbol of the dumbing-down and standardization of American life?” The Atlantic 07/01

NO SIGN, NO WORK: The National Writers Union plans to sue big publishers such as the New York Times challenging the “legality of the Times’s policy requiring writers to waive their rights as a condition of getting new work.” Inside.com 07/05/01

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY TWAIN: “Mark Twain made a deal with the editor of the Atlantic Monthly more than a century ago: He would write a story, then ask other well-known authors to compose their own versions from the same outline. Editor William Dean Howells agreed to publish all of the stories in his literary magazine. No one took up the challenge — until now.” National Post (Canada) (AP) 07/06/01

Thursday July 5

OF E-LOANS AND INCENTIVES: A number of American public libraries have begun lending e-books. “The services may be every bibliophile’s dream, but publishing houses worry that the lending programs will cannibalize their revenue and destroy financial incentives for popular writers. Why would people want to pay for an e-book when they could borrow one free just as easily?” Washington Post 07/04/01

MAKE WAY FOR CONTROVERSY: “Young fans of Make Way for Ducklings are battling Dr. Seuss loyalists for the title of “official children’s book” of Massachusetts. In one corner is Robert McCloskey’s 1941 tale of a mother mallard shepherding her ducklings through Boston’s narrow cobblestone streets to safety in the Public Garden. In the other are devotees of Dr. Seuss’ whimsical neologisms and looping rhymes. Passions are running high on both sides.” Chicago Tribune 07/05/01

REMEMBERING MORDECHAI: Mordechai Richler’s books were selling briskly Wednesday as Canadians remembered one of the country’s best-known writers. “He gives you a nostalgic feeling of the good old days when immigrants were building up the city, building up the country.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/04/01

• IN HIS OWN WORDS: Mordecai Richler’s last column for a Canadian newspaper shows much of his trademark wit and self-deprecating attitude towards his chosen profession. National Post 07/05/01

Wednesday July 4

MORDECHAI RICHLER, 70: Mordechai Richler, one of Canada’s best-known writers, has died of cancer. “The Quebec author of 10 novels is best known for his works on Montreal Jewish life.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/03/01

MEASURING BOOK SALES: A new more accurate measure of book sales is coming. That’s good, right? Maybe – but it’s likely to turn the book business on its ear. For example, romance novels, which don’t make it onto the Bestseller lists now, are likely to come roaring up as a category. And other categories…Sure you want to hear this? Inside.com 07/03/01

THE NAPSTER OF BOOKS: A week ago, “Barnes & Noble.com, the No. 1 U.S. online book store, halted the sale of electronic books after Russian company Elcomsoft began selling a program to illegally copy text.” Adobe, which makes software for e-books, put pressure on the Russian company. Result: the Russians quit selling their software. Now they give it away free. The Moscow Times 07/04/01

YOU GOTTA START SOMEPLACE. MIGHT AS WELL BE THE TOP: Nell Freudenberger got a job at The New Yorker. The magazine published one of her stories. Now she’s juggling six-figure offers for a collection of her stories. Her only problem seems to be that, so far, the published story is the only one she’s written. Inside.com 07/03/01

Tuesday July 3

THE FUTURE OF BOOKS MAY BE… BOOKS: E-books, beware. There’s a man out there with a machine that can print and bind and deliver a book in minutes. “The high-speed printer spits out double-sided pages in rapid succession. The sheets are clamped, glued, covered, and sheared. Watching the book move along is a bit like watching a doughnut go through a Krispy Kreme machine. In seven minutes, I am holding a finished book, its spine still warm from the hot glue. I fan the pages and giggle. ‘Yeah, it’s a book, a real book’.” Business2.com

USING NEW TECHNOLOGY TO STRENGTHEN THE OLD: “Instead of dampening the sales of books, the Internet actually has sparked interest, through the expansion of online book clubs and chat rooms. These clubs are fast becoming the author’s – and publisher’s – best friend, by combining the old-fashioned notion of word-of-mouth with high technology.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 07/02/01

KNOW WHAT YOU WRITE:To write about life in a small village 330 years ago, it helps to know about life in a small village now. “I know the feel of a newborn lamb’s damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities.” The New York Times 07/02/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday July 2

WHAT’S WRONG WITH TODAY’S FICTION: BR Myers writes in the current Atlantic Monthly that stars of the contemporary writing establishment have lost their way [the piece is not online]. Critic Jonathan Yardley heartily agrees: “Myers looks back, as I too most certainly do, ‘to a time when authors had more to say than ‘I’m a writer!’; when the novel wasn’t just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket.’ He notes with dismay the disdain in which such fiction is now held in proper literary circles, where the pretentious display of self-consciously ‘writerly’ prose is valued while plot, narrative and character are scorned.” Washington Post 07/02/01

LOOKING GOOD… Do an author’s looks sell books? “It’s a closed-doors secret in contemporary American publishing, but the word is leaking out. Not that you have to resemble Denzel Washington or Cameron Diaz, but if you can write well and you possess the haute cheekbones of Susan Minot, the delicate mien of Amy Tan or the brooding ruggedness of Sebastian Junger, your chances are much greater.” Washington Post 07/02/01

Sunday July 1

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T BUY LOVE? “Basel, rich in art-loving patrons, offered a sum of 30,000 Swiss francs for a “modern city novel.” The only specifications were that it be written in German and reveal “intensive preoccupation” with the city. Some 107 authors, almost a quarter of them from Germany, submitted outlines and text samples. And the winner is…” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/29/01

Friday June 29

WIN WITHOUT WINNING: So the US court says publishers owe freelance writers extra money for electronic publishing rights. Publishers just include electronic rights with paper rights in a take it or leave it deal. So freelancers are unlikely to come out ahead. Wired 06/28/01

TOO POPULAR? “Could it be that accessibility is a dirty word for many literary pundits? Certainly the great postwar movements in literature — the nouveau roman in France, the formlessness of much American beat literature, the disjointed anti-narratives of John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon — helped marginalise the conventional novel, depositing it in that critical file marked Antiquated and Reactionary.” The Times (UK) 06/28/01

Thursday June 28

REINVIGORATING AN INSTITUTION: Book-of-the-Month Club used to be a giant of the publishing business. But its influence (and number of customers) has declined precipitously with the success of online booksellers and superstores. Now BOTM is returning to its roots, appointing new judges in the hopes of regaining its influence. The New York Times 06/28/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ANYTHING NOT TO PAY: Publishers are busy removing freelance material in their archives rather than pay free-lancers for electronic rights after Monday’s Supreme Court ruling in the free-lancers’ favor. The Writers Union says “These threats are a slap in the face of the United States Supreme Court and they are particularly distressing because we, from the very beginning, really put out the olive branch to the industry saying, ‘We’d like to work these solutions out with you’.” Inside.com 06/27/01

BASIC REVIEW: What is happening to the art of book reviewing? “There is nothing the book industry – and, I suspect, many authors – would like more than to get rid of reviews entirely. We are not effective advertising. Our focus on content rather than image makes us hopelessly out of step with the times. In the twenty-first century we may well become an endangered species – a few of us kept alive in captivity to serve as quote whores, but otherwise extinct in our native habitat of books.” Good Reports 06/28/01

TRYING TO GET TWAIN RIGHT: Berkely Press is issuing “the only authoritative text” of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Trouble is, Berkley made the same claim for an earlier, different version of the novel. And Random House publishes “the only comprehensive edition.” Why the confusion? Blame it on 19th-century typesetters. “They don’t make a very great many mistakes,” Twain complained, “but those that do occur are of a nature to make a man curse his teeth loose.” Nando Times 06/28/01

PRIM AND PROPER WORD: If you’re writing recipes or a technical manual for in-line skates, Microsoft’s Word software may be just the thing for you. But if you’re writing a bodice ripper, or good old fashioned erotica, the word processor’s built-in thesaurus, “whose 222,000 words are purged of any sexual content,” will probably let you down. American Prospect 07/02/01

Wednesday June 27

MARK TWAIN’S LATEST STORY: “The Atlantic Monthly’s publication this summer of Mark Twain’s “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage”—a story Twain submitted to The Atlantic in 1876 that was essentially forgotten and remained unpublished until now—has drawn renewed attention to the author and his connection with the magazine. The relationship began in December, 1869…” Atlantic Unbound 06/25/01

Tuesday June 26

SUPREMES – WRITERS RETAIN E-RIGHTS: The US Supreme Court strikes a blow for freelancers, ordering publishers to treat electronic rights for published material as separate. Now publishers, including The New York Times, “face the prospect of paying substantial damages to the six freelancers who brought the lawsuit in 1993 and perhaps to thousands of others who have joined in three class-action lawsuits against providers of electronic databases, which the court also found liable for copyright infringement.” The New York Times 06/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

• PUBLISHERS REACT: Publishers say they will begin removing freelancers’ work from electronic databases as soon as possible. A spokesperson for the New York Times said “about 115,000 articles by 27,000 writers would be affected. All appeared in the paper from about 1980 to about 1995.” The New York Times 06/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

STRUGGLING WITH MEIN KAMPF: Since the end of World War II, Germany has stuck to a policy of banning all speech that could be construed as pro-Nazi. The party itself is illegal in Germany, as is the publication or sale of the writings of the Third Reich. Now, debate has reopened on whether or not to allow the distribution of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s blueprint for world domination. New Statesman (UK) 06/25/01

Monday June 25

FREELANCERS’ BIG WIN: The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of freelance writers and photographers, voting “7-2 that compilation in an electronic database is different from other kinds of archival or library storage of material that once appeared in print. That means that copyright laws require big media companies such as The New York Times to get free-lancers’ permission before posting their work online.” SFGate 06/25/01

Sunday June 24

LET THE SCHMOOZING COMMENCE: As BookExpo, Canada’s largest publishing convention, gets underway in Toronto, there are signs that things may be looking up for the industry. For the first time in several years, Chapters, the nation’s dominant bookstore megachain, is sending a sizable contingent to the convention, and overall, the atmosphere is noticably more cooperative than it has been in quite some time. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 06/23/01

A LOT OF BLANK PAGES: When Douglas Adams, author of the best-selling “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books, died last month, he left behind less of a legacy than his publisher had hoped for. Adams, who was famous for crippling bouts of Writer’s Block, had produced only eight pages of writing in the last ten years while working on a novel for which he received a whopping $10 million advance. National Post (Canada) 06/23/01

RECAPTURING RESPECTABILITY? Clive James was once described in The New Yorker as being “a great bunch of guys” who seemed unable to settle on which personality should be dominant. James, who has been writer, TV personality, and Japanese game show host, is releasing two volumes of essays this year, and he admits that this renewed attempt at “seriousness” is prompted in part by the fear that the more frivolous aspects of his career would define his place in history. The Observer (UK) 06/24/01

Friday June 22

A POET LAUREATE FOR THE MASSES: The U.S. has a new poet laureate, and if you were hoping for a seriously high-minded, no-nonsense craftsman, you’re going to be disappointed. Billy Collins, who teaches at Lehman College in upstate New York, believes that humor “is a door into the serious,” and his irreverent style has made him a favorite of magazines like The New Yorker and radio programs like A Prairie Home Companion. Dallas Morning News 06/22/01

Thursday June 21

THE PERVERSION OF COPYRIGHT: “Try to talk to any normal American about how this country’s copyright law has gone off the rails, and you’ll likely witness a new speed record for how quickly his eyes glaze over. That’s why, when I want to communicate the horror of modern copyright law, I use the example of horror writer Stephen King, who (at least in theory) is a potential victim of the current state of the law.” Reason 06/18/01

COPYWRECK: Proposed changes to Australian copyright law will allow European and American publishers free access to Australia. “The effect will be that new Australian writers will find no financially viable local publishers able to pick up their work and nurse and carry their first few relatively unprofitable books during the time that it takes for a writer to mature and find a substantial readership.” Sydney Morning Herald 06/21/01

Wednesday June 20

STANDING BEHIND YOUR WRITER: Earlier this year, when a judge ruled against Alice Randall’s right to publish her parody of Gone with the Wind, many thought the project would die. But publisher Houghton Miflin stood against the odds. ”You have to stick by your authors. ‘Many publishers drop a book like a stone after one negative review, but we were sticking by our author. We felt her book had integrity, and we were not going to abandon it.” Boston Globe 06/20/01

E-BOOKS ARE COMING. SLOWLY, BUT THEY’RE COMING: “To expect a practical business plan for unmediated electronic publishing to arise full blown from the existing industry would be to disregard the waywardness of human endeavor, the complexity of the emerging digital future… the wish of today’s publishers to enter the digital future in approximately their present form. But to assume… that a reasonable business plan may not sooner or later emerge would be to ignore the persistence and ingenuity with which human beings have invented their world so far.” New York Review of Books 07/05/01

A FRENCH BOOK INSTITUTION: Bernard Pivot is a literary institution in France, where, for 28 years, he’s hosted a TV program on books. Times have changed since the program started, though, and as Pivot retires this summer, many fear the French government television network will not replace Pivot and continue the show. The New York Times 06/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)

MUSIC AS MUSE: Some writers need silence to concentrate; others need music. “Like fiction, music is an art that exists in time. Like fiction, music is always promising an imminent conclusion and then introducing complications. Like fiction, music can be plain to the point of plainsong or as intricate as counterpoint, and both extremes can be satisfying.” The New York Times 06/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday June 19

UNIVERSITY E-PRESS: While e-publishing bedevils most commercial publishers, university presses are forging ahead with e-projects. The advantages are many for academic books, and since university presses tend to be collegial with one another rather than competitive… Publishers Weekly 06/18/01

GEISHA SUES: “Memoirs of a Geisha, an account of a young girl sold into the geisha world who overcomes the animosity of a rival geisha and becomes one of Kyoto’s most luminous geishas, has sold four million copies.” Now the retired geisha who provided Arthur Golden with much of his background for the book is suing Golden. “She said that by using her name, despite what she claims was an agreement to keep her identity secret, Mr. Golden disparaged her reputation in the geisha community, which has for centuries maintained a tradition of discretion. She is now suing him for a portion of the book’s profits. The New York Times 06/19/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE COMIC WEB: Once a national pastime (half of the U.S. population regularly read comic books in 1945), comics in the ’90s flirted with extinction: Only one in a thousand Americans were buying. But comics may prove to be indestructible, thanks in part to a secret weapon – the Web.” Wired 06/18/01

Monday June 18

TRACKING BOOKS: Accurate statistics on book sales have always been difficult to come by. Now Bookscan, a unit of Soundscan, the company that brought order to recording sales stats, hopes to tame the book industry; it has signed up major chains and booksellers. The New York Times 06/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)

A FAKED HISTORY: Esteemed historian Joseph Ellis taught a class on Vietnam and America at Mt. Holyoke College, but the “personal recollections” he included in the course were fabricated. Ellis, reports the Boston Globe, had never served in Vietnam. Boston Globe 06/18/01

POWER OF THE PRIZE: In general, literary prizes help sales of a book, helping it stand out from the other 14,000 books published in a given year. “The less information consumers have about something, the more they’re forced to rely on such third-party imprimaturs. This helps explain a curious fact about American literary prizes: they generally help relative unknowns much more than stars.” The New Yorker 06/18/01

DIGGING THE PAST: Historical fiction is hot. “You can pick any serious American writing from the past decade, any novel or short-story collection that either crossed over to the best-seller lists or won a major award, and the odds are good it’s historical fiction. This is surprising because American fiction hasn’t been like this for decades – if at all.” Dallas Morning News 06/17/01

OH TO BE A CANADIAN POET: Book critic Dennis Loy Johnson is impressed with a Canadian poetry award – the Griffin – that gives poets $40,000. “If giving already wealthy poets big cash prizes and throwing them fancy balls is putting poetry back in the mainstream, I say point me toward the door for Canada, baby.” MobyLives 06/18/01

Sunday June 17

BESTSELLING WHAT? Few Americans read. Those that do…well, a look at the bestseller lists is not encouraging. “This is not progress. This is not reading. These are not books. They’re feel-happy lists clotting pages.” Philadelphia Inquirer 06/17/01

Friday June 15

APPEALING TO A HIGHER READER: Conventional wisdom is that intellectual books don’t sell well. Yet Louis Menand’s tome The Metaphysical Club documenting the lives and influence of William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes, has quickly hit the best-seller lists, selling out its first U.S. printing of 25,000, and is well into its second run. The Globe & Mail (AP) (Canada) 06/15/01

OUR FLEXIBLE, COMPENDIOUS, TORTURED, LANGUAGE: That ultimate arbiter of our lexicon, the Oxford English Dictionary (just plain OED to the in-crowd) has 1,250 new or revised entries. They’re at the OED website now, but won’t be in the published edition for years. Among the additions: d’oh, bad hair day, full monty, retail therapy. Nando Times (AP) 06/14/01

Thursday June 14

INTELLECTUAL FAILURE: The Australian Review of Books was a noble experiment to appeal to Australian intellectuals. But that it failed is “all too indicative of what is wrong with the intellectual-literary-artistic scene in Australia. It is dominated by politics and partisan hatreds, as well as irrational obsessions with figures like Rupert Murdoch. Sydney Morning Herald 06/14/01

THE CRITICS REVIEWED: Three critics with reputations for being tough reviewers have their own books coming out – and one can see other critics polishing up their critical responses. The new authors will just have to suck it up if the reviews are harsh. “To be reviewed harshly is painful. If you are a critic you are expected to shut up if it happens to you.” The New York Times 06/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)

BLOOMSDAY IS COMING: Anyone who has ever tried to tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses alone knows what it is for one’s brain to actually, physically hurt. Possibly the most complex work of twentieth century fiction, the tome has nonetheless attracted a devoted following. This Saturday (June 16) is “Bloomsday,” the day on which Ulysses takes place, and the Joyce fans will all be coming out of the woodwork. Chicago Tribune 06/14/01

Wednesday June 13

READING BERLIN: Berlin’s first International Festival of Literature opens with 100 writers from around the world. “The program ambitiously sets out to present the literatures of the world as comprehensively as possible, with the underlying hope that quantity will automatically translate into quality at some point.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/13/01

Tuesday June 12

NAMING RIGHTS: A book without a title is…well, something pretty hard to sell. But choosing that right title – and hoping it hasn’t been used by someone else in the meantime – is a tricky business. Poets & Writers 06/01

PRESENTATION COUNTS: Some people were not surprised that Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize. They were in the audience when “the shortlisted authors read extracts from their work to a paying audience. Grenville’s performance was the one that really stuck in the mind… despite the competence and skill of the other pieces, her reading was invested with a different level of energy and enthusiasm.” The Guardian (UK) 06/09/01

SELF-PORTRAITS IN PROSE: “To talk about oneself used to be considered unseemly: the classic autobiographies and the classic novels that pretend to be somebody’s memoir all begin by offering extenuating reasons for doing something so egotistical. Even now, when self-centeredness hardly requires an apology, a book of self-examination, a novel cast as a personal recollection, continues to invite a self-justifying explanation.” The New Yorker 06/18/01

THE MARRIAGE OF NAPSTER AND E-BOOKS: Audio books are going high-tech. In place of that box full of cassettes, now there’s a direct download to your MP3 player. “The thing has no moving parts. You can throw it against a wall and it still works. It’s far superior to buying or renting or ordering it by mail, and maybe having to pack it up and send it back. And it’s cheaper, too.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 06/12/01

ELECTRONIC PAPER NOW AVAILABLE IN COLOR: Electronic paper “never needs a backlight. In addition, it only needs power when the image changes. Once an image has been produced it will remain visible even with the power switched off.” According to the manufacturer, “Laptops, palmtops and cellphones with rigid electronic paper screens will be on the market within the next two years.” The New Scientist 06/06/01

Monday June 11

FEED STARVES WITH SUCK: Two eminent web publications – Feed and Suck – shut down operations Friday as the internet shakeout of content sites continues. Suck was known for its irreverence, Feed – often linked to here on ArtsJournal – for its thoughtful consideration of ideas. Inside.com 06/08/01

BUYING IN TO THE NEW YORKER: So what does it take to get your writing in The New Yorker magazine? How about a little cash up front? “According to the May 8 edition of the industry e–newsletter PW Daily, to follow in the footsteps of Nabokov, Cheever, Updike and Salinger all you have to do is ‘ante up a premium ad fee. That’s what it will take to buy an advertorial excerpt in the pages normally reserved for the superliterati’.” Mobylives 06/11/01

Sunday June 10

SERIAL WRITING: Fifteen prominent Irish writers collaborate on a novel, each contributing a chapter to the project. It’s not a great book, but “the committee approach adopted in Yeats Is Dead! capitalises on something which many of us have secretly known for some time: most contemporary Irish novelists are best appreciated in small doses.” The Sunday Times (UK) 06/10/01

AN ORIGINAL AS RAW MATERIAL: There is a long tradition of artists appropriating characters or ideas out of other artists’ work and enlarging, expanding or retelling the work from a different perspective. So how is novelist Alice Randall’s retake of Gone with the Wind any different? The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/09/01

Thursday June 7

ANOTHER CHAPTER OF ULYSSES HITS THE BLOCK: James Joyce’s manuscript draft of the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses sold for $1.5 million six months ago. Now, a draft of the “Eumaeus” chapter is available, and is expected to go even higher. “The 44 hand written pages, covered in notes, revisions and amendments in three coloured inks, should fuel the [Joyce] industry for decades to come.” The Guardian (UK) 06/05/01

THIS YEAR’S HOTTEST PUBLISHING PHENOM? Jabez – it’s a kind of “anti-self help book. “Since November, The Prayer of Jabez has sold 4.5 million copies, zooming to the top of myriad best-seller lists.” What’s the attraction? “It may be that the Jabez craze is driven not so much by our insatiable desire to be richer, thinner, more significant – but by our exhaustion in the effort.” The New Republic 06/06/01

POETRY’S PIECE OF THE PIE: “A pair of Canada’s richest literary prizes will be handed out tonight for the first time to one of the country’s most overlooked artistic groups — poets. The inaugural edition of the annual Griffin Poetry Prize — which includes two separate awards of $40,000 each — will be announced at a gala ceremony in Toronto.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 06/07/01

Wednesday June 6

ORANGE PRIZE WINNER: Australian novelist Kate Grenville wins the Orange Prize, the UK’s richest fiction award, worth £30,000, for The Idea of Perfection. Margaret Atwood, who had previously won the Booker Prize had been the favourite. BBC 06/06/01

READY TO PILE ON? As a critic, James Wolcott is brutal in his assessment of others – especially other critics. Now he’s about to release a book. A novel. About a cat. Revenge, anyone? New York Magazine 06/04/01

Tuesday June 5

E-BOOKS FORGOTTEN? At this year’s BookExpo, traffic was brisk in the print-book areas. But “it was a different scene in the area referred to by many conference goers as the Internet Ghetto. Business on publishing’s new frontier was quiet and the number of exhibitors was way down, from 120 in 2000 to 80 this year. Last year, all anybody talked about was e-publishing. This year, the subject was as rare as an out-of-print book.” Wired 06/04/01

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? FOR ONE THING, SCARY NOVELS: Crime fiction “is more realistic, more violent and more anarchic than ever before.” But why is so much of it read – and written – by women? “Girls are always being told not to go down dark alleys. This fear stays with us for the rest of our lives. Writing or reading about it is a way of taking the lid off it, of exploring it, rather than just sliding around it.” The Guardian (UK) 06/04/01

IS THE LORD OF THE RINGS REAL LITERATURE? It’s been voted the greatest book of the 20th century, and a jillion-dollar movie version is on the way. The continuing debate about its status was summed up 45 years ago by W. H. Auden: “Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some for whose literary judgment I have great respect … I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light ‘escapist’ reading.” Salon 06/04/01

Monday June 4

GENDER WAR: The Orange Prize for Literature goes to “the best English-language book authored by a woman and published in Britain.” But this year, administrators of the prize decided that a parallel all-male jury would be created to come up with its own list of finalists, but that only the decisions the all-female jury would count. “It’s at this point that most people intelligent enough to read and write, or at least to blink their eyes, might begin to suspect that establishing two competing juries, one male and one female, for the same award was a surefire headline-grabbing publicity stunt designed to morph into a headline-grabbing gender war.” Ottawa Citizen 06/04/01

HOW TO RUIN THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY: Australia proposes to change its copyright laws and admit books published in other countries without tariff. “But if Australia becomes an open market, the Australian publisher will have to compete with American and British editions of the same book. Safe inside their own copyright territory, the Americans and British get Australia as a bonus. They don’t even have to pay the author for this new market, because of the firmly entrenched practice of paying export royalties.” Sydney Morning Herald 06/04/01

BOOK SALES DOWN: “Despite a healthy economy and the popularity of J.K. Rowling’s novels about a kid wizard, sales of general interest books dropped 3.3% in the USA last year, according to an industry study.” USAToday 06/04/01

• HYPING A FLAT MARKET: Attendees at the annual BookExpo in Chicago say the book industry has been flat for two or three years. “The Internet gets part of the blame. People turn to the Web for information they might once have found in a book. What they don’t seem to be doing yet in big numbers is downloading e-books to personal computers, PalmPilots or e-book reading machines.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/04/01

Friday June 1

DOING AN END-RUN ON AMAZON: As bookselling continues to become a business of megastores and online behemoths, Oregon’s famous independent bookseller, Powell’s, has been a beacon for those retailers struggling against the big chains. Now, Powell’s online counterpart has struck a major deal with several national magazines which will give the store much-needed exclusive exposure on the mags’ heavily-travelled web sites. National Post (Canada) 06/01/01

BOOK E-WARDS: Surprising some, administrators of the National Book Awards say e-books will now be considered prizes. “The new rules will mean that any book published exclusively as an e-book can be considered by judges in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature on its ‘literary merit’ just like any other book.” Inside.com 06/01/01

JANE AUSTEN, WHERE ART THOU? Are writers and publishers of fiction failing their readers and disguising political harangues as narratives? One critic thinks so: “Every modern novel I read is about one or more of the following three things: a weak and passive woman victimized in the most ghastly and degrading way; a person of colour or a homosexual or someone with a visible disability ruined by a fat, conscienceless, moronic white person; or endemic, and/or unsolvable poverty caused by heedless First World greed.” National Post (Canada) 06/01/01

ENVISIONING THE E-LIBRARY: Representatives from countless U.S. public libraries met in Chicago this week to discuss everything from funding to PR. But the hottest topic was technology, and the expected rise of the e-book. “Few conclusions were reached, but that wasn’t the point. Tuesday’s meeting was much more than an example of how libraries, particularly public libraries, are willing to go to the mat to bring the newest of digital technologies to the widest of audiences.” Chicago Tribune 06/01/01

Thursday May 31

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL LITERARY FANTASY?The success of fantasy novels like Harry Potter has attracted waves of new writers ready to supply fantasy product. But is success killing the magic? “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.” Slate 05/30/01

CAN YOU GET ROYALTIES FROM A DICTATOR? Canadian artist Jonathon Bowser was shocked to learn that one of his paintings was used for the cover of a romantic allegory written by Saddam Hussein. In it, Hussein “portrays himself as a benevolent king bestowing love on his people.” Says Bowser: “Where are my royalties, that’s what I want to know. A romantic allegory isn’t necessarily bad, I just would have chosen a different author.” National Post (Canada) 05/30/01

Wednesday May 30

WRITERS’ SANCTUARY: Nigeria has offered itself up as a sanctuary for writers in trouble. “To date, it has offered asylum to 32 international authors, filmmakers, composers and journalists.” CBC 05/29/01

WANT TO COLLABORATE WITH MARK TWAIN? Like most writers, Mark Twain left unpublished work. One piece is a story intended as a collaborative experiment with other writers. It went nowhere. Now the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, which owns rights to the story, has renewed the experiment, with cash prizes for those who come up with the best ending to Twain’s story. CBC 05/29/01

Tuesday May 29

BOOKS HOLDING STEADY: Compared to newspaper and magazine publishing, the book-selling business seems to be weathering the economic downturn in pretty good shape. In the first quarter of this year “bookstore sales at Barnes & Noble increased 4.3%, to $807.9 million. At Books-a-Million, total revenues rose 4.7%, to $97.5 million, but comparable-store sales were down 6.8% in the quarter, largely due to the strong performance of Pokémon products last year.” Publishers Weekly 05/28/01

DO BOOK CLUBS KILL FICTION? Blame the boring uniformity of today’s fiction on the Book Club Phenomenon. So many “literary” books tend to look so alike because publishers are thinking about whether book clubs will buy them. The Independent (UK) 05/28/01

CHARACTER ASSASSINATION: French heirs of writer Victor Hugo are furious over a new sequel to Les Miserables, Hugo’s best-known work. They’re going to court to block publication. “We do not consider this a sequel, but a rewriting. It’s not a sequel when you resurrect characters. Just because the book is in the public domain, it doesn’t mean you can do what you like with it.” The New York Times 05/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday May 28

WIND HITS THE PRESSES: Armed with an appeals court’s permission to publish, Houghton Mifflin is anticipating an initial print run of 25,000 for The Wind Done Gone. But the parody’s legal troubles may not be over just yet. Inside.com 05/25/01

WHAT THEY’RE READING IN AUSTRALIA: In book sales for the past year, it’s just like everywhere else – Harry Potter. JK Rowling’s Harry sagas took the top four places on the bestseller list. The Age (Melbourne) 05/28/01

Sunday May 27

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND: A federal appeals court has cleared the way for publication of The Wind Done Gone, a novel that parodies, and borrows liberally from, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The ruling reverses a lower court decision blocking publication. Nando Times (AP) 05/26/01

Thursday May 24

THE E-FUTURE: Is there an audience for e-books? “Subscription, pay-per-view, ad-supported – online publishing will only succeed when there are many business models, and publishers and users can choose the appropriate model for their needs.” Publishers Weekly 05/21/01

DUMPING AMIS AND DISSING THE NOVEL: Judges for the Samuel Johnson non-fiction award pushed Martin Amis off their short list in favor of a book about trilobites. Then they claimed that there was “huge public appetite and excitement for non-fiction at the moment which is not matched by that for the novel.” The Guardian (UK) 05/24/01

Wednesday May 23

MAYBE HE’LL MOVE THE SCROLL TO BALTIMORE: Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript for On the Road was sold at auction for $2.43 million yesterday, more than $1 million over the expected sale price. The manuscript is written on one continuous roll of paper. Oh, and the winning bidder? That would be Jim Irsay, best known as the owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. MSNBC 05/23/01

THE SATIRE DONE GONE? With the US District Court decision blocking publication of The Wind Done Gone, many professional satirists are wondering just what precedent has been set. The Court had previously allowed purveyors of parody a wide berth when it came to lifting material, but the new ruling could change everything. Hartford Courant 05/23/01

JUST PROVE IT: A site that has been tracking sales of e-published books begins to doubt the accuracy of numbers supplied by publishers. Some refuse verification of royalty payments, so now some of the formerly-best-sellers have been removed from the list. Wired 05/22/01

WRITING ON THE WALL? The legendary Writer’s Voice program at New York’s West Side YMCA, “an unusually fertile training ground for writers,” has announced it was canceling its summer programs. But a recent troubled history of management and rumor has many wondering if the program will ever resume. They worry that a “20-year-old community institution whose students and professors have included the likes of Pulitzer winner Michael Cunningham, Walter Mosley, and Sue Miller” will be lost forever. Village Voice 05/22/01

Tuesday May 22

THE CHANGING ‘WIND‘: “This Friday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will rule on whether or not Judge Charles Pannell was right to ban publication of first-time novelist Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, “a parody … from the slaves’ point of view” (the description is Randall’s) of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, that had been scheduled for publication in June.” National Post (Canada) 05/22/01

Monday May 21

THE NEXT CHAPTER: Troubled Canadian book superstore Chapters is downsizing to try to solve its money woes. But “why should Chapters have its wings clipped? Just because it expanded far too rapidly? Just because it targeted and drove independent bookstores out of business? Just because it strong-armed and bullied publishers? Just because it returned books by the truckload? Just because it delayed payment of its bills until publishers and authors alike teetered on the edge of bankruptcy? Just because its doomed course – iceberg? what iceberg? – might well have dragged a sizable chunk of Canadian publishing down to the bottom with it?” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/21/01

HIT THE ROAD JACK: The manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is to be auctioned off this week, and scholars are unhappy. “The item is unique among works of 20th-century literature because, rather than a stack of typed pages, the manuscript is a continuous 37-metre scroll of heavy tracing paper. ‘The scroll is the most important document in the entire Kerouac archives, and it shouldn’t be separated from the rest of the archives’.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/21/01

EVEN IF YOU PAY… There are lots of problems with the magazine Foreword‘s announcement it will review books for authors at a cost of $295. “It’s obvious that ForeWord won’t get much business from the publishers it claims it means to serve. See, ForeWord reviews will be worthless unless they seem objective, and so they’re going to have to be negative on occasion. Do you think publishers are going to pay for bad reviews? Big publishers don’t need to, and small publisher don’t have the money to waste.” Mobylives 05/21/01

Sunday May 20

UNRELIABLE SOURCES: Critics seem to be wrong just about as often as they’re right. From the archives of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, the reviews of readers considering what books to publish, show serious lapses in judgment. The Observer (UK) 05/20/01

Friday May 18

iPUBLISH = iHIGHWAY ROBBERY? The Writers’ Guild is warning its members to stay away from iPublish, the digital imprint of TimeWarner Books. The Guild claims that iPublish’s standard contract forces authors to give up too many rights. Wired 05/18/01

VOLCANIC VERSE: Tomaz Salamun is one of Eastern Europe’s most celebrated poets, yet he views himself as a “monster.” His bleak, sometimes violent poems reflect the harsh landscape of the wartorn region he hails from, and he seems to consider his art as much a weapon as a mode of expression. “Poetry makes a human being more human, but it can also dehumanize, like a big passion, a horrible obsession driven by laws that are beyond the human.” San Jose Mercury News (AP) 05/18/01

Thursday May 17

MISERABLES II – GAVROCHE STRIKES BACK: “Descendants of Victor Hugo, outraged by a contemporary sequel to his 1862 novel “Les Miserables,” urged France and the European Parliament on Tuesday to condemn the commercial misuse of literary classics… ‘Does anyone think someone could commission a Tenth Beethoven Symphony?’ they asked in an open letter.” Chicago Tribune 05/17/01

Wednesday May 16

BAD FOR BOOKS: It’s been a miserable few years for the Canadian book industry. “The situation, in which the industry has been hit by much heavier than usual returns – as staggeringly high as 60% in some cases – has undergone a bewildering sense of disorientation, and has experienced an agonizing feeling of betrayal, and can only get better.” Publishers Weekly 05/14/01

RULES OF LIFE: How truthful should biographies attempt to be? “It is striking that while biography itself goes in and out of fashion with critics and publishers (not long ago, it was being asserted in publishing circles that the bottom had dropped out of the biography market: popular history was all the rage), the debate over the rules or ethics of writing life stories never dies away.” New Statesman 05/14/01

WORDS OF THE AGES: Do writers get better with age? “The older an author gets, the easier it is for them to leave behind the preoccupations of their youth, to invent freely and explore with ambition. Thus the long-distance author shape-shifts in mid-career.” The Guardian (UK) 05/16/01

RECORD PRICE FOR CELINE MANUSCRIPT: The French National Library, exercising a right to match private bids, paid 11 million French francs ($1.5 million) for the hand-written first draft copy of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night. It is believed to be a record for a manscript auction. Chicago Sun-Times (AP) 05/16/01

DRAT! WE GOTTA REPRINT ALL THOSE HISTORY BOOKS: There are data to suggest that Columbus actually reached the New World in 1485, on a mission from the Vatican. What about that 1492 thing? Just a return voyage, say the believers. “The story of the discovery of America is filled with misinformation. Simply, it is a great marketing operation by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.” Discovery 05/15/01

Tuesday May 15

FIRST TIME’S A CHARM: First-time Canadian author Alistair McLeod wins the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award – literature’s richest prize at $172,000 CDN. CBC 05/14/01

Monday May 14

READING DROPOUTS: An alarming number of Americans is choosing not to read, says a new study. “We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in which reading is not required. The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Washington Post 05/14/01

LIFE OF THE PARTY: Academics have generally distrusted writers of biographies. “Although biographers do pretty much the same thing as academics – they go to libraries, find stuff out, and then publish books about it – the two camps have always kept themselves stiffly to themselves, held apart by a barely disguised tangle of envy, suspicion and defensive superiority.” Those attitudes may be thawing. New Statesman 05/14/01

WORDS MATTER: A little book on writing, written in the 1950s, reminds that “the right words arranged in the right order can be weapons, that culture and education are political and that good, radical ideas have a curious ability to elude the spin doctors.” The Observer (UK) 05/13/01

THE FAN LIBRARIAN: With the internet, a new kind of “librarian” emerges. Fans of authors collect up everything available on their heroes. “Each is part fan, part archivist, part technician, using the resources of the Web to pay tribute to an author he or she loves. It’s a unique joining of the old fashioned with the up to the minute: for with these sites, as with creation itself, in the beginning was the word.” Boston Globe 05/14/01

Sunday May 13

A TRULY HOOPY FROOD PASSES ON: Douglas Adams, author of the sci-fi cult classic book trilogy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has died of a heart attack at age 49. There is no word on who inherits his towel. Nando Times (AP) 05/12/01

• AND A FRIEND REMEMBERS HIM: “To his friends Douglas Adams will be remembered as a giant of a man with a kindness to match. But to his fans I think he will be seen as someone who brought wit into science fiction. With the greatest respect to Gene Roddenberry and others, that had not been done before.” The Observer (London) 05/13/01

Friday May 11

CAN’T HANG ON TO THEM: Amazon claims 32 million customers. But is it true? An analyst says the company is losing customers fast. “Amazon lost 2.3 million customers in the quarter ended March 31, while adding 3 million first-time shoppers.” Bookwire (USAToday) 05/09/01

Thursday May 10

NAME GAME: A work of art scarcely exists without a name, a title, something to call it that will place it where it’s supposed to be. So what happens when nothing comes to mind? Poets & Writers 05/01

INVISIBLE AUTHOR: “Don DeLillo is, in every way, what undergraduate literature courses dub a Major Author. Yet he is also an essentially invisible author, largely unread by and unknown to not simply the vast majority of Americans, but the vast majority of well-educated Americans, most of whom have never read one of his books and could not name even one of his many memorable characters. His situation thus represents something of a mystery.” Reason 05/01

BUYOUT: So now a website is offering authors the opportunity to buy reviews. What’s the point, wonders Alex Good. “Whether a book that does get a paid review will be any better off is doubtful. With all of the stigma that attaches to self-publishing and e-publishing, one can imagine an even more negative response to this kind of reviewing, with its obvious violation of canons of objectivity.” And do reviews make a difference, anyway? GoodReports 05/10/01

Wednesday May 9

AIM FOR THE CENTER: “A society in which literature has been relegated – like some hidden vice – to the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime.” The New Republic 05/08/01

PAID REVIEWS: Only about 10 percent of the some 70,000 books published annually are ever reviewed professionally. So now you can buy one. “Any publisher or author can buy a review through a website for $295. Included in the price is the right to print the review in any marketing or publicity effort, lifetime archival of the review on-site, and distribution to numerous licensees.” Wired 05/09/01

A BOOK IS A BOOK OF COURSE OF COURSE: Random House is suing e-publisher RosettaBooks for publishing electronic versions of books Random had previously published. The original contracts assigned “book rights” to Random. So do electrons constitute a book? Some heavy definitions are in order… Inside.com 05/09/01

PSYCHIATRISTS, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, LOVE HARRY POTTER: “The children’s book character makes mistakes, but he comes through in the end. He not only survived an abusive childhood in the home of hateful relatives, but he came out with hope and an ability to love.” Dallas Morning News 05/09/01

Tuesday May 8

THE WIND IS MISERABLES? “Call it parody, plagiarism or sequelization, once-upon-a-time-one-more-time is the idea for a spate of recent books. Of course, literary borrowing isn’t exactly new – Aeschylus borrowed from Homer; Shakespeare borrowed many plots.” Los Angeles Times 05/07/01

THE DOWNSIDE OF THE e-SLUSH PILE? Electronic publishing has held out the promise that authors can more easily get their work out to an audience. But “there has been a surprising backlash against writers being able to make their work so readily available. Many voices have been raised, saying that all this is a bad thing. A very bad thing.” Is it? Complete Review 05/01

THE RETURN OF SHORT STORIES? Why aren’t more short stories published? Publishers are convinced that short fiction, like poetry, is a refined form that is, “essentially, too snooty to attract a large audience, and they’re not going to publish any more of the stuff than is absolutely necessary to give one of their writers — or themselves — the faintest of literary veneers.” Nonetheless, are there are signs of a possible revival? Mobylives.com 05/07/01

Monday May 7

LITTLE THINGS MATTER: Why are newspapers cutting their books sections? “Information about books is hard to come by. If one knows exactly what one is looking for, then of course it is fairly easy. But one of the great things about book review sections and magazines is that one comes across information about titles one never knew existed, or titles one had not considered in the proper light.” The Complete Review 05/01

INTERRUPTING THE CULTURE OF THE PRINTED PAGE: Just why are libraries destroying books and newspapers after preserving them electronically? The information contained on pages may thus be preserved, but such destruction is an interruption in the culture of reading pages. Are not the artifacts at least as important as the representations of them? The Idler 05/07/01

ATLANTIC CUTS BACK: Recent years have seen a slew of “old-guard” magazines being taken over by famous editors, causing long-time readers no small amount of trepidation. When Michael Kelly came to The Atlantic last year, he promised a cosmetic facelift, but no change in the historic monthly’s editorial direction. Now comes news that the July and August issues will be combined, and the worried speculation starts all over again. The New York Times 05/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday May 6

TAKING OFF ON THE WIND: Why is the parody version of Gone with the Wind in legal trouble? “Though clumsy, self-important and sometimes laughably silly, The Wind Done Gone ardently contests the romanticized view of the antebellum South set down in Gone With the Wind and proposes an Afrocentric version of history in its stead. It is both a commentary on an iconic work of fiction and a repudiation of that novel’s worldview.” There is a long literary tradition of doing this. The New York Times 05/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE NEW EMPEROR: Dave Eggers is a one-man literary juggernaut. From his successful novel, to his snide, caustic, website McSweeney’s, to his own personal publishing house, Eggers has become the under-30 answer to Ted Turner: an undeniably brilliant but self-possessed mind dragging the world kicking and screaming into the next incarnation of entertainment and information, a place where the world is not entirely sure it wants to go. The New York Times 05/06/01 (one-time registration required for access)

CONFLICTING INTERESTS? A reporter’s investigation and some subsequent resignations rock the Hollywood Reporter. The issue points up some of the difficulties when the industry you cover is also the industry that buys your ads. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/05/01

Friday May 4

DEUX TOO MUCH: The family of French writer Victor Hugo are trying to block publication of a book that has been dubbed “Les Miserables II.” “The novel, which has been described as a blasphemous betrayal by its critics, contains many of the characters from Hugo’s famous portrayal of social injustice in revolutionary France.” BBC 05/04/01

ACCESSIBLY RARE: Only a few scholars and wealthy collectors have access to rare manuscripts and book. They’re too fragile to be handled. “Providing access to rare books while trying to preserve them is ‘the biggest problem libraries (with special collections) have.” Digital technology may help. Wired 05/03/01

HUNDRED-MILLION HARRY: Sales of the Harry Potter books have passed the 100 million mark worldwide. Harry has been translated into 42 languages. Ottawa Citizen (AP) 05/04/01

Wednesday May 2

THINK OF IT AS PIZZA FOR YOUR BRAIN: “Last week, Cathy Kelly became the Romantic Novelist of the Year, winning £5,000 and very little respect from the critics. This is par for the course in the world of romantic fiction: you earn a lot and die unnoticed… All the genre novels have a hard time in literary circles… but special abuse is reserved for the romantic novel. It’s the junk food of the literary appetite.” The Guardian (London) 05/01/01

Tuesday May 1

A CELEBRATION OF WHAT? National Poetry Month was a real bust. All it did was focus attention on how much disrepair the art of poetry is in. Why are things so bad? “The dullness of today’s poetry has become so pervasive, such a given, that we have to force ourselves to remember that poetry is not at all dull by nature.” GoodReports 05/01/01

VOICE OF THE CITY: Twenty-five years ago, Armistead Maupin signed on with a San Francisco paper to write a daily fiction serial focusing on the lives of singles, both gay and straight, in the City by the Bay. Such openness was nearly unheard of at the time, but “Tales of the City” struck a public chord, and catapulted Maupin into the ranks of the superstar authors. San Francisco Chronicle 05/01/01

AFTER A LONG THINK: Just as the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism was about to go to print, it was discovered that the tome was about 300 pages too long. “After two weeks of debate and intellectual horse-trading, a new table of contents emerged. Twenty-one thinkers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Elaine Showalter, vanished from the collection entirely; selections from three others were trimmed.” Chronicle of Higher Education 04/30/01

HOW TO BE GREAT: Why are the Great Books great? “It does not rest on William Bennett’s assertion that the great is great because ‘it is the best that has been thought and said.’ The greatness of the great does not and cannot rest on a question-begging platitude.” Context 04/01

CALLING ALL AUTHORS: “IPublish.com is a combination publishing house, bookstore, writing school, online writing community, talent search show and lecture hall all in one. And integrating all those elements into one site has taken the better part of a year.” Wired 04/30/01

Monday April 30

CUTTING BOOK REVIEWS: Some of the most prominent American newspapers are reducing or cutting their book sections. Why? The newspaper business is currently in a down cycle and newspapers are looking for ways to slim down. “Publishers generally cite finances — costs have gone up and readership down. Plus, book sections rarely bring in much advertising — in fact, less now than formerly.” Mobylives 04/29/01

DROPPING THE HABIT? A major new Australian study measures the reading habits of students. “While 45 per cent of primary school students enjoy reading, read frequently and see reading in a positive light, only 24 per cent of secondary students are as enthusiastic. Older boys are more likely than girls to find reading boring and nerdy.” Sydney Morning Herald 04/30/01

Friday April 27

RACISM IS… Last week, a panel of teachers in South Africa ruled that Nadine Gordimer’s book July’s People was unsuitable for high schools, and, said the panel of white South Africans, the novel was “deeply racist, superior and patronizing. It is no wonder that this message is not very popular in South Africa, even 10 years after the end of apartheid: It is one of those unpleasant truths that are likely to be ignored or suppressed for the sake of political correctness.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/27/01

WRITING MANUAL: Want to be a writer? Here are 13 helpful rules to getting in print – “Avoid cliches like the plague.” National Post 04/26/01

Thursday April 26

THE BOOK DONE GONE: The author of The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone with the Wind says she’s shocked at the outcome of a court case that says she ripped off characters from the original Gone with the Wind and that she violated copyright. “I did not seek to exploit `Gone With The Wind.’ I wanted to explode it.” The New York Times 04/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE GHOST TOWNS OF SCHOLARSHIP: Most unpublished manuscripts probably don’t merit publication. Others – new studies of the American West, the revolution which provoked US intervention in Grenada, and the heritage of indigenous Mexicans – seem not only worthy but essential. Yet for various reasons, their authors are reluctant to finish and release them. Chronicle of Higher Education 04/27/01

THE BAD BOY OF BRITISH FICTION: “Everything Welsh has written is, in one way or another, about a struggle to find community in environments where the idea of community seems redundant, where physical appetite and brutal self-interest are rampant, and where authority is synonymous only with repression.” Prospect 05/01

WRITERS’ BLOCK? NO PROBLEM: “It’s not a problem for me,” says the new Pulitzer winner for fiction, “and it’s not for any writer that has a regular work schedule. It’s not a problem generating new material.” What can be problematic is wrapping it up. Like the nearly-abandoned 2600-page draft of a previous book. Financial Times 04/23/01

BELFAST POET WINS QUEEN’S GOLD MEDAL: Michael Longley was successful through the Sixties, but stopped publishing in the Eighties. Now he’s at it again, saying “at the ripe old age of 61, I feel as though I’ve just started.” His friend Nobelist Seamus Heaney calls Longley “a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.” The Guardian (London) 04/24/01

THE CASE OF THE IMPROBABLE VILLAIN: Ever wondered about that Holmes-Moriarty confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls? Didn’t Sherlock’s explanation ring hollow? Now the truth can be told. The Guardian 04/26/01

DID WELLS STEAL? In 1925 an unknown Canadian writer sued HG Wells for ripping off her work for Wells’ Outline of History. The suit was dismissed, but should it have been? Had it had fair consideration “the case would have been one of the most notorious literary scandals of the twentieth century.” Lingua Franca 04/23/01

Wednesday April 25

A MINDBLOWING AUTHOR OF STAGGERING EGO: Dave Eggers has become well-known in journalistic circles as the toughest interview on the literary scene today. The best-selling author, who has developed a cult following of David Sedaris-like proportions, only conducts interviews by e-mail, and has publicly savaged critics whose profiles he dislikes. But to fans of his work, he is the most accessible writer to come along in years. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/25/01

NOW THEY LISTEN: When he was alive, Kenneth Burke’s books and ideas puzzled his colleagues. “But in recent years, critics have read them with something like deja vu: Burke’s literary analysis extends to the most far-reaching speculations about those familiar topics in contemporary theory: language, power, and identity.” Chronicle of Higher Education 04/23/01

GONE WITH THE COURT RULING: “Houghton Mifflin Co., which hopes to publish a fictional ”antidote” to ”Gone With the Wind,” filed an appeal in Atlanta’s 11th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday, contending that the book is political parody protected by the First Amendment.” Boston Globe 04/25/01

Tuesday April 24

DIFFICULT TRANSITION: “As if in microcosm of the rest of society, the book business is being changed by the rise of mega–corporations and new technology. It’s being made further tumultuous by issues of consumerism and individual rights that can’t keep up. And the spate of court cases may have just put the tumult into hyperdrive.” Mobylives 04/22/01

FLAT BOOKS: Exports of American books to the rest of the world stayed flat last year. It “marked the fourth year in a row of little change in book exports with export sales ranging between $1.90 billion and $1.84 billion in the 1997 through 2000 period. Exports to the top 15 markets for American books rose 0.4% in 2000, to $1.662 billion, and represented 88.5% of all exports.” Publishers Weekly 04/23/01

Monday April 23

THE E-MAIL EFFECT: Is the informality of e-mail dumbing down our literateness? There’s no question it’s having an influence. The e-mail genre affects “contemporary American writing courses, in particular the principle that content is not to be sacrificed to form. Thus creative writing, according to the latest methodology and the e-mail genre, gives preference to the spontaneous word over all formalism – a bold thought that provokes contradiction.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/23/01

BOOK CUTS: As newspapers cut budgets to cope with a downturn, one of the first targets of cuts is book coverage – several newspapers are folding their standalone book reviews. The New York Times 04/23/01 (one-time registration required)

WORLD WAR II, CLOSE UP AND FAR AWAY: At least from the time of Homer, writers have tried to put war into words. But what is written about war – even one particular war – can change over time. “The novels of the immediate postwar era… were often exercises in retrospective fixing [while] a modern novelist is likely to be interested in more elemental themes of loss, betrayal and divided loyalty or questions of national identity.” The Guardian (London) 04/21/01

THE MAGIC OF THAT FIRST BOOK: An author always remembers the thrill of seeing that first book in print. “Whether you’re a novelist, a poet or a nonfiction writer, initially there’s something giddy and unreckonable to that process by which an untidy manuscript is converted into the neat, durable-looking, hinged rectangle of a book.” The New York Times 04/23/01 (one-time registration required)

Sunday April 22

OF REPUTATION AND FAME: “He has written seven novels, widely acclaimed but is scarcely heard of outside the literary world. He is regularly compared to Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo, and these are not rhetorical devices. His subjects are universals: the power of science, the power of the human mind, computers, artificial intelligence, the meaning of thought, love, loneliness and friendship. He is a rigorous intellectual and a powerful advocate of emotion, and sometimes even sentiment. Why then is he not better known?” The Telegraph (UK) 04/21/01

DIALOGUE BETWEEN LEGENDS: “The Harlem Renaissance was divided between those who saw the value of the arts primarily in terms of service to civil rights and those who believed that artistic and literary freedom were the only civil rights worth having.” A new book detailing the 20-year correpondence between black poet Langston Hughes and white critic Carl van Vechten examines the intricacies of the debate. The New York Times Book Review 04/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

RIGHTS TO PASTERNAK ARCHIVES SETTLED: “The court dismissed an appeal by the family of Olga Ivinskaya, on whom Pasternak based the character of Lara in his novel Doctor Zhivago, leaving his daughter-in- law, Natalya Pasternak, as sole inheritor of his manuscripts and notes.” The New York Times 04/21/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday April 20

SOME GOLDEN AGE: Editors/publishers are idiots. They’re paid to select writers and books they think will sell. And repeatedly they pass over quality work. A look at the trove of publishers’ rejections from the Alfred A Knopf archives reveals some major blunders. National Post (Canada) 04/17/01

THE POETRY PROBLEM: “No one, other than poets themselves, really gives a damn about poetry. There was a time when daily newspapers published poems regularly. What U.S. daily would publish poetry today? These days newspapers rarely review poetry, much less print it. Ask any editor of a periodical devoted to poetry and he or she will tell you that the number of submissions are quite a bit higher than the number of subscribers.” Baltimore City Paper 04/18/01

(ABANDON)(REJECT)(DISCARD) YOUR ROGET: Who needs a thesaurus? It was only good for crossword puzzles anyway. It “fostered poor writing. It offered facile answers to complex linguistic questions… It enabled students to appear learned without ever helping to make them so. It encouraged a malaprop society. It made for literary window dressing. It was meretricious.” Atlantic Monthly May 2001

A LITTLE SHUFFLING DOES NOT A POEM MAKE: When you shuffle those little words scattered on a refrigerator door, are you, as the makers of Magnetic Poetry insist, “responding to some of the deepest urges in the human animal?” Hah! “A lot of people might consider singing in the shower the satisfaction of an urge, but I don’t think that when I yodel an approximation of an aria, it helps me appreciate Verdi.” Slate 04/19/01

DOESN’T ANYONE WRITE ORIGINAL STUFF ANY MORE? In a new first novel titled The Persia Cafe, several passages are identical to passages from Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees. The offending novelist offered to apologize privately to Kingsolver, but refuses to issue a public apology. Inside 04/19/01

PASSING THE PROSE: Raymond Carver’s place in American letters is secure. But the style of prose he wrote has passed on. “If we think of prose style not as an adornment but as a kind of ethics-cum-aesthetics, then the passing of the restrained, noun-centered mode can be seen to map a broader, more encompassing shift in the Zeitgeist.” The Atlantic 01/01

Wednesday April 18

BOOKS, BOOKS, AND MORE BOOKS: The online economy may be tanking, but bookseller Barnes & Noble says its sales in the first quarter of this year are up a whopping 23 percent – far outstripping Amazon’s increase. Inside.com 04/18/01

Tuesday April 17

E-BOOKS LAWSUIT: “Authors and agents say what’s at stake in the upcoming lawsuit over interpretation of book contracts is the entire future of the electronic publishing industry. In Random House v. Rosettabooks…Random House alleges it owns the electronic titles based on a clause in the author’s original contracts that gives the publisher the right to ‘print, publish and sell in book form.'” Wired 04/17/01

A REAL OLD-SCHOOL BAD BOY: “Camus described Arthur Rimbaud as ‘the poet of revolt, and the greatest of them all.’ When Rimbaud died of bone cancer at 37, he was virtually unknown beyond the world of the literary avant-garde. Biographer Graham Robb says, ‘the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his published poems.'” Naturally, all this is making him increasingly popular today. CBC 04/17/01

Monday April 16

TOO MUCH: Are university presses turning out too many books? “The currency of books is becoming deflated in a way that is reminiscent of the decline of the German deutsche mark in the early 1920’s, and the culprit is the same: hyperinflation. Our system of book publishing, which rests on the premise that we promote people who publish, is spiraling out of control. Indeed, the whole system needs to be changed.” Chronicle of Higher Education 04/16/01

ONLINE SLOWDOWN: After several years of phenomenal growth, sales of books online seem to be slowing. “Some analysts warn that the slowdown in online book sales bodes ill for sales of other products that are not as well suited for Internet transactions.” New York Times 04/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)

UP THE AMAZON: So Amazon is taking over Borders’ online opeations. The benefits to Borders are clear – the operation was a money-loser. But what’s in it for Amazon? Publishers Weekly 04/16/01

Sunday April 15

DESTROYING THE WRITTEN RECORD: In some cases, there are only a couple of complete original paper collections of major newspapers left in existence. So why are major libraries destroying them? Los Angeles Times 04/15/01

Friday April 13

THE PRIZE THAT SELLS: If you want to boost sales for a book, which prize helps the most? The Nobel? The National Book Award? Nope, it’s the Pulitzer. “For somebody who hasn’t read about the book, who doesn’t know the author, the Pulitzer is this great seal of approval that makes someone pick it up.” Brill’s Content 05/01

WHY EDITORS GET GRAY: Houghton Mifflin plans to publish The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone With the Wind. The estate of Margaret Mitchell hopes to prevent it. What’s at stake here is principle, of course. Lawyers for both sides insist it’s not about money. Perish the thought. Several prominent writers – including Harper Lee, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Shelby Foote, and Charles Johnson – have issued a statement supporting publication of the parody. Washington Post and Nando Times 04/13/01

THE HARRY POTTER EFFECT: Nearly half a billion juvenile books were sold last year, a third more than in 1995. “I don’t think anyone would dispute the fact that the [Potter] books have single-handedly generated enormous interest in fiction…. Potter got people reading. Will that level be maintained? I’d like to believe it, but I’m not sure.” MSNBC (AP) 04/13/01

SAVING THE WORLD, AND THE TIMES, AND THE TRIB: The efficiency of electronic storage has persuaded most librarians to discard their old newspapers. Not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. One writer cashed in his retirement account to buy the collection of American newspapers being jettisoned by the British Museum, and now has set up The American Newspaper Repository. Newsday and The Standard 04/12/01

Thursday April 12

UNCHAIN MY HEART: Independent bookstores are in court this week suing large book chains for trying to put the indies out of business. “A lawyer for the independents blamed their losses on private, discriminatory discounts from publishers” available only to the chains. San Francisco Chronicle 04/10/01

WHO’S THE E-GUTENBERG? Even as web publishers and content providers gasp for air to survive, many are still touting the digital e-book as inevitable. “Some compare the digital revolution to Gutenberg, public education and the mass-market paperback in its impact as a milestone in the democratization of literature.” The Idler 04/12/01 

Wednesday April 11

AMAZON REDUX: Fresh from a modest Wall Street victory (first-quarter losses were smaller than expected), Amazon.com is flexing its muscles once more. At a news conference today, the world’s largest on-line bookseller is expected to announce an arrangement which would, in effect, let it take over the online operations of Borders. Also, Amazon will start offering Adobe’s e-book reader software on its web site, and will sell some 2000 books formatted for that reader. MSNBC and Bloomberg 04/10/01

ANOTHER PRIZE FOR ROTH: Philip Roth has won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner award for his novel, The Human Stain. Roth also won seven years ago for Operation Shylock. He and John Edgar Wideman are the only authors to win the award twice. CNN 04/10/01

INCREASED PULITZER PAYOFF: This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners in journalism, literature, and music will receive $7,500 each, an increase of $2500 from last year. The winners will be announced next Monday. Editor & Publisher 04/10/01

Tuesday April 10

SPACE SAVERS: “Librarians have purged their shelves of newspapers because they are driven by a misguided obsession with saving space. And they have deluded themselves into believing that nothing has been lost, because they have replaced the papers with microfilm. The microfilm, however, is inadequate, incomplete, faulty, and frequently illegible.” New York Review of Books 04/26/01

Monday April 9

PROUST AND THE CRITICS: “Literary criticism in Germany – if one ignores the odd illusion of a lively and argumentative literary scene as served up by the mass media – continues to enjoy a poor reputation with the reading public and writers alike.” Marcel Proust took on critics for sport – but only after they’d died. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/09/01

DAVID SHIELDS ON CRITICS: “I find bad reviews fascinating. They’re like the proverbial train wreck, only you’re in the train; will all those mangled bodies at the bottom of the ravine tell you something unexpected about yourself?” The New York Times 04/09/01 (one-time registration required)

ALL ABOUT THE BIO: To read the bios on some books, you’d think writers of books all lived in Brooklyn and had other, non-writerly jobs. How’s that for a work of fiction? MobyLives 04/09/01

Sunday April 8

DISAPPEARING BOOKS: Libraries have been destroying books and other materials they don’t know how to keep. So “how to preserve the nation’s vast library collections. Books, periodicals, newspapers, recordings and digital material are all in danger of being lost. And as a new draft report by the Council on Library and Information Resources makes clear, there are no national standards for saving these resources.” The New York Times 04/07/01 (one-time registration required)

WHAT I HAVEN’T READ: Everyone has books they feel they should have read, just to keep up their education. Canada’s National Post canvased publishers, critics and writers to find our what books those in the business of books haven’t read (and feel they ought to have). National Post (Canada) 04/07/01

OH, TO BE A CANADIAN WRITER: Something’s happening to Canadian fiction. “There are more good writers writing it. There are more aggressive agents willing to flog it. There are more publishers, both domestic and foreign, interested in buying it. There is substantially more money being spent to acquire it – and, as a result, to promote it. There are more bookstores willing to showcase it. There is more prize money around to inspire it. And there are more books clubs, on-line and off, to read it.” Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/07/01

Friday April 6

DEAD OR ALIVE: When Jaime Clarke’s book got a bad review by an unattributed reviewer in Publishers Weekly (where all reviews are anonymous), he demanded to know who wrote the review. So he put up a thousand-dollar reward to whomever revealed the name… Mobylives 04/04/01

WEEP AND REAP: The weepy tail of tragedy as told by Asian women is a hot international publishing phenomenon. “Of course, Asian men have lived through exactly the same painful collective pasts and presumably write just as much. But they don’t get agents and book contracts like their female counterparts. Why?” Far Eastern Economic Review 04/1/01

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, DOCTOR SEUSS, DOCTOR SEUSS?: What do Deborah Norville, Rosanne Cash, Dr. Ruth, Judge Judy, John Lithgow, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Sting have in common? They’ve all published – or are about to publish – children’s books. Really. Even Dr. Laura, whose third books for kids is in the works. Washington Post 04/04/01

Wednesday April 4

“GARFIELD” THIS ISN’T: If you are already acquainted with Jimmy Corrigan (the smartest kid on earth, you know,) there is no need for you to click on this link. But if the graphic novels of Chris Ware are unfamiliar to you, read on to learn about the man who is simultaneously reinvigorating the world of alternative comics and taking the publishing world by storm. New York Times 04/04/01 (one-time registration required)

Tuesday April 3

THOSE QUIET FOLK TO THE NORTH: There are so many good Canadian writers around today, you’d think they would be recognized as a national group. Maybe they need to be more pushy. “What Canadians (even the newest) are good at is quietly subsuming themselves to bad governments, to monopolies and to other nations’ cultural institutions. We are hardly the noisy patriots that, in the Commonwealth, the Australians — and, it seems, the Indians now are.” National Post (Canada) 04/02/01

CHALK UP ONE FOR NASA: For 250 years, archaeologists have known about the vast libraries buried in volcanic debris at Herculaneum. One scholar even suggested “If you were going to recover all the lost literary works of antiquity in one place, this is your best chance.” The catch was, the scrolls were so badly damaged they couldn’t be read. Now, with technology developed for outer space, the scrolls are being deciphered. US News 04/09/01

Monday April 2

ONE FOR THE BOOKS: Book sales in America’s top three bookstore chains – Barnes & Noble, Borders and Books a Million – increased last year by 9%, to $7.21 billion. Barnes & Noble sold $3.5 billion worth of books last year. Publishers Weekly 04/02/01

Sunday April 1

MAKING BOOKS OUT OF MOVIES: The quickly cranked out book based on some popular movie or another, is a lucrative genre. Albeit one with a bit of a stigma. It’s still a quick and dirty business, multiplying the 20,000 to 25,000 words of a shooting script into a 60,000- to 70,000-word manuscript. As the writer, you never have to worry about getting stuck. “The next scene is always there.” The New York Times 04/01/01 (one-time registration required)

Friday March 30

THE FAKE POETRY BENEFACTOR? A year ago reputed dot-com whiz Ravi Desai lit up the poetry world with his pledge to give $2 million to the University of Washington to support the study of poetry. But now, after a number of discrepancies in Desai’s story, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that the university will ever see the money. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 03/24/01

POETS-IN-TRAINING: Ride a train in Sicily this month and you’ll be greeted with poetry. “Around 50 Italian poets – from famous names to up-and-coming authors – are climbing aboard to chat to unsuspecting passengers and read their works to what is in effect a captive audience in southern Italy.” BBC 03/30/01

LOVE IT TO DEATH: Is National Poetry Month a bad idea? “National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally ‘positive.’ The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an ‘easy listening’ station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way.” University of Chicago Press 04/01

PROTO-HOLMES: A ghost story written 125 years ago by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was an 18 years old will be published for the first time today. Scholars believe the story’s characters are precursors of Doyle’s most famous creations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Telegraph (London) 3/30/01

Thursday March 29

FOR POETRY, APRIL IS THE COOLEST MONTH: In spite of Eliot’s line about the cruelest month – or perhaps because of it – April has been named National Poetry Month. It’s not a bad idea, and might even generate some interest in what seems to be a deteriorating art form: more and more people writing it, fewer and fewer reading it. Publishers Weekly 03/26/01

DON’T MESS WITH HARRY: The author claiming JK Rowling ripped off key ideas for the popular Harry Potter books has quickly annoyed Rowling and her publisher with her claims – there is that expensive movie coming out, after all. So this week Rowling’s publisher and movie producer filed a preemptive suit against Nancy Stouffer. But don’t expect Stouffer to stage a quick retreat any time soon. Washington Post 03/28/01

THE WAR OF THE WINDS: A book titled The Wind Done Gone is ready for publication; it’s a version of Gone With the Wind, told from the perspective of an ex-slave. The new book’s publisher calls it fair comment “on a book that has taken on mythic status in American culture.” The estate of Margaret Mitchell calls it copyright infringement, and is suing to block its publication. CNN (AP) 03/28/01

LOOKS SELL BOOKS: It’s old news that beauty sells – but it’s a hard truth to swallow for those in the book business, where what’s between the covers is supposed to matter more than whose face is on them. But to the chagrin of many, “whether a new author is seen as gorgeous or not – has become a key criterion in deciding whether a book gets the kind of marketing push that will give it a chance of selling.” The Guardian (London) 3/38/01

SHAKESPEARE’S PROBLEM? WORDS: For half a century, Frank Kermode resisted the temptation to write a book about Shakespeare. But he finally gave in. “[M]ine would have to be an old-fashioned book, in that it would be as far as possible about the words; and further, I would not spend a lot of time talking about plays I thought ‘not done in the best fashion’ except to say, if I could, why I thought that to be the case; and even to say why I think that Shakespeare as he went on to his finest plays, increasingly and even exultantly skilful, cruel and powerful, was all the more likely to fall over his own feet, to obscure his meaning with his words.” London Review 12/09/99

HOW TO MAKE A PROFIT PUBLISHING: British publisher Bloomsbury doubled its pre-tax profits last year. What helped was that Bloomsbury published Margaret Atwood’s Booker-prize-winning novel The Blind Assassin. What really helped is that Bloomsbury publishes Harry Potter. The Guardian (London) 03/29/01

Wednesday March 28

LEARNING ABOUT BOOKS: Australia’s book industry has mostly run its business by the seat of its pants. It’s difficult to know who reads what and why. “However, under economic and technological pressure to perform better, that has begun to change. This year government- and industry-funded programs have begun to gather information on who reads books, who doesn’t and why, and what sort of books we like best.” Sydney Morning Herald 03/28/01

WE MADE A MISTAKE? Why would a publisher go to the expense of printing a book, sending it to critics, then ask for it back? Dennis Loy Johnson went looking for the answer… The Idler 03/27/01

EARLY THIS MORNING, IT WAS NUMBER 46: What do the Amazon book-sales figures mean? There’s a big difference between number 16 and number 42,000, but maybe not quite as big as you’d think. Slate 03/26/01

WHY THE BOOK AND THE MOVIE ARE DIFFERENT: It’s said that no decent person would want to see what goes into the making of sausage, or of laws. That may also be true of turning a book into a movie. “The business of selling books to Hollywood is straightforward in appearance only. Simmering below the surface is a reality far more byzantine, rife with moles and secret deals and clandestine alliances. Quite often, the book itself is secondary to the events surrounding it.” Publishers Weekly 03/26/01

HIS AND HERS JURIES: The richest literary award in England – the £30,000 Orange Prize – is open to women only. Until this year, the judges also were women only. Now a second jury – all men – has been asked to rate the contenders as well. Are the women giving in? “It hadn’t occurred to me at all that we are giving in to men. It doesn’t matter what they come up with. It’s the old story: we don’t have to listen to them.” Guardian (London) 03/27/01

THE ORIGINAL WOLFE: Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel” began as a huge manuscript, which editor Maxwell Perkins helped trim into a novel. A new un-edited version finally shows what was cut. “Wolfe was a Mahler, who believed that ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ Perkins sought to transpose him into a Bruckner, homely, sublime, and unfailing in the magisterial flow of his logic.” Boston Globe 03/27/01

Tuesday March 27

BAD TIME FOR BOOKS: Australian booksellers are in despair. “Many bookshops reported their worst year of trade ever last year, with sales commonly down 20 per cent after the introduction of the GST and the Olympics. Their problems are compounded by the economic slump, the continuing fall in the dollar and rise in paper costs. Now a new threat looms. Sydney Morning Herald 03/27/01

BOOK SAVIOUR? “All too often, a university-press book is published, sells through its printing in several years, and then goes out of stock, often indefinitely, despite the fact that some demand for it still exists.” Enter print-on-demand. “Making use of the latest printing technology, numerous university presses — Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, N.Y.U., Oxford, and Princeton, to name but a few — are currently engaged in major initiatives to breathe new life into hundreds of books that have gone out of print or are in danger of going out of stock.” Chronicle of Higher Education 03/20/01

• SAVIOUR OF WHAT? “For many authors, the technology is a godsend, making their out-of-print books available for libraries and future generations of scholars and students. For others, however, the technology raises ethical and legal issues, some of which are so potentially serious that they can impede a professor’s productivity.” Chronicle of Higher Education 03/30/01

BEGGING FOR COMPETENCE: Canada’s authors are on a roll, scooping up literature prize nominations all over. But “our authors are so fine, why can’t our publishers and booksellers get it together?” National Post (Canada) 03/27/01

AUTHOR ANXIETY: “Writers may face anxiety at any stage of creation, as they move from feeling to thought, thought to page, page to publisher, but women ‘freeze up earlier in the process.’ Women are more likely to be anxious about the value of their ideas in the first place, while for men, the issue is how to deal with the competition.” The New York Times 03/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

OVERWHELMED IN LEIPZIG: Attendees at the Leipzig Book Fair are overwhelmed. “As the number of books increases to bewildering proportions, the spectrum of publishing houses is becoming increasingly streamlined. Even previously small market segments, such as audio books, have expanded to an extent which even specialists find overwhelming.”  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/26/01

Monday March 26

THE BORROWERS: “It is high time creative writers reclaimed their right to borrow from others, without shame. If we go back to pre-romantic times, the heinous crime known as plagiarism simply did not exist. There were many sins a writer could commit – bombast, bathos and prolixity – but borrowing was not one of them. Everyone picked and stole from everyone else and English literature was a patchwork quilt of cross-reference, allusion and misquotation, in short, exuberant word-play.” The Observer (London) 03/25/01

THE RELUCTANT BIGWIG: “Who is Ann Godoff? At 30, the president of Random House was an aimless temp. At 40, she was quietly editing for the two biggest party boys in publishing. By 50, she’d beaten all comers to lead the most important imprint in the book business. How’d she do it? Well, she doesn’t want to talk about it.” New York Magazine 03/26/01

Sunday March 25

THE DEATH OF LIT CRIT: What, wonders Martin Amis, has happened to literary criticism? Answer: it democratized and died. “You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerd-othon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.” The Guardian (London) 03/24/01

Thursday March 22

GETTING PAID: This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could have huge implications for publications that reproduce their print editions online. The plaintiffs contend that newspapers and magazines have no right to reproduce the work of freelancers online without compensating the authors. The defendants include The New York Times, Lexis/Nexis, and a host of other publishing giants. Wired 03/22/01

SELLING IT: As the publishing world continues to look to new technologies to boost sagging sales and reinvigorate the book-buying public, one company is relying on what has always made it a success: marketing, marketing, and more marketing. “Between 1995 and 1999, [Sourcebooks] notched a 542 percent increase in sales and was ranked last year 494th on Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the nation.” Chicago Tribune 03/22/01

KEEPING THE HOMEFIRES BURNING: Chapters, Canada’s answer to Barnes & Noble, has fallen on hard times recently, and the sales slump has panicked Canadian publishing houses. Now, the country’s largest publisher is insisting that reports that it plans to slash the number of “homegrown” titles it puts out are false, despite recent reports to the contrary. National Post (Canada) 03/22/01

BEAT BLEAT ON THE BLOCK: Jack Kerouac composed his paean to American life, “On the Road,” in a caffeine-and-drug-induced three-week typing binge, single-spaced on a 120-foot long scroll of hand-cut paper. He was fond of unrolling it to its full incredible length, so that friends could view the manuscript itself as a road to be travelled. The original scroll will be auctioned off this spring at Christie’s in New York, an irony that will not escape any fan of the author’s work. The New York Times 03/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

A GERMAN BOOK OSCAR: “The German publishing world wanted a big-time spectacle, and so it invented a ‘German Book Prize,’ an award without prize money. Instead, this honor is intended to eclipse all the other 750 literature awards in Germany.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/22/01

Wednesday March 21

EMERGENCY AID: The Canadian government is giving $1.3 million to 22 publishers to help them out after financially-strapped bookseller Chapters returned a huge number of unsold books rather than pay for them. “Industry insiders estimate that Chapters has returned as many as 50 per cent of its books instead of paying publishers for the merchandise.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/20/01

LESSING WINS BRITAIN’S RICHEST BOOK PRIZE: At 81, Doris Lessing has been awarded the £30,000 David Cohen prize for a lifetime of excellence, “52 years after she arrived in Britain from Rhodesia, to be confronted by a media article announcing that the novel was dead as a literary form. But in her suitcase was a manuscript [The Grass Is Singing] which helped restore the novel to blazing life when it reached bookshops the following year, 1950.” The Guardian (London) 03/21/01

CHECK-OUT COUNTER READING GETS DULL: Those breathy – or breathless – erotic tease lines are disappearing from the covers of women’s magazines. The change is prompted more by demographics than by morality. “I think that beyond the ‘ick’ factor, there is a boredom factor. Once you’ve found out how to supersize your sex life four different ways, the fifth is not all that interesting.” Inside 03/20/01

Tuesday March 20

THE FUTURE IS “E”: “In five years, the consumer e-book market (according to figures from Accenture) could be roughly 10% of the $22 billion consumer book market – not counting print-on-demand, which could double the total. Major publishers, are casting their P&Ls aside… to invest in the e-book market, there is more than $100 million in investment by the major publishers into e-books and the digital infrastructure required to store and retrieve them.” Publishers Weekly 03/19/01

ARE YOU READY TO DIE FOR NORMAN MAILER? “One does, in the course of a writing life, create a lot of hostility. I think I’d almost rather have it that way than have people say, ‘Oh, what a nice guy.’ I think a healthy person should be able to die for a few ideas — and can feel well loved if a few are ready to go all the way for him or her.” Poets & Writers 03/01

THE SUBTLE POLITICS OF SPELL-CHECK: “Suppose you type in Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao. Word 97 knows them all. Try Ghandi, however, and you get a red squiggle underneath. Good guys have no place in the modern cultural consciousness. Your computer knows baddies Lenin and Trotsky, but not peace lovers Lennon, McCartney, and Starr. It remembers Auschwitz but not Woodstock.” Exquisite Corpse Issue #8

NAPSTER WAS JUST THE BEGINING: Many writers are asking to be paid extra when their published work goes into an electronic archive. “The case turns on the question of ownership. Changes that Congress made in the copyright laws …made it clear that these writers still own their articles after publication, but that publishers could still include them in ‘revised’ versions of the newspaper. Now, do electronic archives qualify as a ‘revision’?” The New York Times 03/19/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday March 19

SLUSH-BUSTER: Vanity press books haven’t exactly improved just because digital technology makes them more viable. “Print-on-demand houses solicit clients online, then use the latest technology to crank out only enough books to meet existing orders—a run so small the book would sink in the mass market. An examination of randomly chosen Xlibris fiction titles reveals a catalog full of clichéd plots and terrible-to-middling writing, not to mention downright bizarre notions of the world.” Village Voice 03/13/01

Friday March 16

COINCIDENCE OR PLAGIARISM? JK Rowling, the superstar author of the “Harry Potter” series, is under fire from a writer in Pennsylvania, who claims that her 1984 book was the inspiration for the blockbuster children’s series. “Rah and the Muggles” does bear a striking similarity to Rowling’s work in several ways, and even features a character called “Larry Potter.” BBC 03/16/01

WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THIS BEFORE? Canada’s Ruth Schwarz Children’s Book Award is one of the country’s most prestigious prizes for a category of literature that too often consists of trite teen romances and cheesy Nancy Drew knock-offs. Why is the award so coveted by authors and publishers? Well, for one thing, the judges are children themselves, and they know what they like. Ottawa Citizen 03/16/01

Thursday March 15

THE DILEMMA OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING: The prices of scholarly journals are rising exponentially, but payments to authors and referees are not. “When scholars and scientists realize how commercial interests have benefited from their labor, and how little say they have about the matter, they can’t help but ask, ‘Isn’t there a better way?'” One possibility: do it yourself. Wired 03/15/01

RESCUING POETRY AND CALLIGRAPHY TOGETHER: Poetry books usually do not sell many copies anyway; the poetry of an obscure seventeenth-century Asian concubine, written in a nearly-indecipherable text, must have seemed like a particularly bad bet. But it’s going into a third printing. “Ho’s work really ‘jumped from woodcut to digitization, skipping the whole Gutenberg process,’ said John Balaban, the North Carolina poet who translated her folk poems and helped oversee their presentation in the strikingly designed book.” The New York Times 03/15/01 (one-time registration required for access)

MAGAZINE AWARD NOMINEES: The New Yorker is the “Gladiator” of magazines this year, having been nominated for eleven National Magazine awards. Esquire is second with eight. A dozen others received multiple nominations, including Rolling Stone and Martha Stewart Living. Inside 03/14/01

COMPETING WITH HARRY: A new Potter book is coming out, complete with Muggles and… The author who is suing JK Rowling claiming Rowling stole her Harry Potter ideas, is reissuing her own Potter books, written in the 1980s. Nando Times (AP) 03/14/01

Wednesday March 14

WHEN LITERAL ISN’T SO LITERAL: A new translation of “Anna Karenina” is out. But how can the reader be sure that it’s a “literal” translation? The answer – you can’t. There’s no such thing, and which version you like depends on your personal taste in prose. Or, you can take Dennis Loy Johnson’s  “Lady With A Pet Dog In The Attic” test. The Idler

CELEBRATING JAMES MERRILL: Six years after his death, on what would have been his 75^th birthday, James Merrill is being feted with the publication of an 885-page edition of his “Collected Poems” and celebratory conferences around the country. “He does with words what Mozart did with notes.”New York Times 3/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)

DEBUNKING A HOLOCAUST MEMOIR: Five years ago, Binjamin Wilkomirski was celebrated as a Holocaust survivor who had written a moving account of his life under the Nazis. Today he is denounced as a fraud, whose only visit to Auschwitz was as a tourist. How could he have fooled so many people? Brill’s Content 03/12/01

Tuesday March 13

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS are announced. The New York Times 03/13/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ROTH’S AMERICA: “Philip Roth’s writing is to the wallpaper of media talk what a Cezanne is to an editorial cartoon. You come to late Roth to clear your mind of shallowness and cliché, to cauterize your facile formulations, to bone your verities. This hurts. Roth can wound. Now that Roth has completed his American trilogy, you can step back from the individual plots, the varied characters and situations, and you can see the vision rising through them. It is a prospect of paradise lost.” The Atlantic 03/12/01

MORE TROUBLES AT AMAZON: The Authors’ Guild is planning to file a protest against Amazon.com for the online retailer’s continuing practice of selling cheap, used books alongside the more expensive new copies. The Guild claims that Amazon “entices” buyers to favor the used titles. Wired 03/13/01

LUDLUM DIES: Spy novelist Robert Ludlum has died, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Ludlum’s novels sold millions, and even high-minded critics admitted a secret penchant for his work. From the Washington Post, for instance: “It’s a lousy book. So I stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish it.” Nando Times 03/13/01

Monday March 12

BULLISH ON TECH: Technology doesn’t spell the end of book publishing, Indeed, “far from being finished, some insisted, the book trade faces a future in which it is likely to flourish as never before.” The Economist 03/08/01

Sunday March 11

BOOM IN BLACK LIT: Black American literature is thriving. “The boom in black fiction has led to the establishment or revival of seven black publishing imprints in the last year alone. And these have come from the biggest houses in the industry – including Strivers Row at Random House and Walk Worthy Press at Warner Books.” Dallas Morning News 03/10/01

Friday March 9

WANTED: A BOOK REVIEW THAT MATTERS:  Statistically Los Angeles is the largest book market in the United States. When Steve Wasserman took over editing the LA Times Book Review he promised big things. But “the fact that no statistic or proportions can explain is this: The LA Times Book Review is boring. Wasserman clearly has good intentions, and sees himself working on the side of the angels. But the Review never happens, it never bites, it never sings, it never laughs.” LA New Times 03/08/01

PEN AWARDS FOR FICTION AND POETRY: The 2001 PEN awards go to a 29-year-old investment banker and a 66-year-old jazz musician and teacher – the stipend is small, but the prestige is considerable. Akhil Sharma is the banker; his novel “An Obedient Father” won the $7500 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for first fiction. Jay Wright is the teacher; his “Transfigurations: Collected Poems” won the $3000 Winship/PEN New England Award. The Boston Globe 03/08/01

NOTHING FICTITIOUS ABOUT RANDOM HOUSE E-BOOKS: Random House believes in e-books; it just doesn’t believe in e-novels. The publisher has ten new e-books due out this Fall, all non-fiction. “All the hype is for trade books because people are fascinated by the idea of the paper novel going out of existence. But nobody thinks that way about a textbook. The e-book is going to be big in education.” Meanwhile, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins are going ahead with e-novels. Salon (AP) 03/08/01

• THE SLO-MOTION REVOLUTION: For some time now e-publishing has been the hype and hope of the publishing industry. But lately the revolution has seemed to sputter. Is it because the technology isn’t there yet or is it the way publishing’s power structure is set up? ArtsJournal.com 03/09/01

THE FIRST PUBLISHED POET WAS A WOMAN: Who is the earliest known author? It was Enheduanna, whose poems were scripted on clay tablets four thousand years ago. A new edition of her work is now available – this one on paper. “Enheduanna was the first theologian in the world. Her writings present a multi-faceted model of women as powerful, assertive, sexual and priestly. Many of [the goddess] Inanna’s qualities foreshadow the powers of the Hebrew god Yahweh in the Old Testament.” Discovery 03/05/01

LECARRE BANNED: John LeCarre’s latest novel, the bestseller “The Constant Gardener,” is set entirely in modern-day Kenya, yet it can’t be found anywhere in the country. Kenyan booksellers are refusing to stock it out of fear of being punished by the authorities for promoting an entirely unfavorable portrayal of the Kenyan government. “In Kenya, the truth is always stranger than fiction.” NPR 3/08/01 [Real audio file]

Thursday March 8

BATTLE OVER E-PUBLISHING RIGHTS: Some e-publishers (and authors) say publishing books in e-form is a new enterprise. Publishers object, claiming they hold rights to the books. Now Random House has sued e-publisher Rosetta over the matter. “The basic premise of Random’s suit is that its contracts with authors gives it the exclusive right to publish the works in book form, which Random says includes e-book formats. Random House contends that e-books are just another way to deliver an author’s words in a different format.” Publishers Weekly 03/05/01

Tuesday March 6

SHORT LIST, BIG PURSE: Six fiction writers have been shortlisted for Ireland’s Impac Literary Award, notable for its wide range of foreign authors (it’s open to books of any language) and for being one of the world’s richest literary prizes. (The winner gets £100,000.) The Guardian (London) 3/06/01

SILVER LINING: A report issued yesterday showed that 10% of Britain’s small independent bookshops have folded in the last five years. Sad news indeed, but “the amazing fact is not that 10% have closed, but that 90% have stayed open. The resilience of the British book industry is quite astonishing: 110,155 books published last year, more than in the US, China or anywhere; of those 110,155, a reasonably assiduous reader might get round to reading 0.02% of them.” The Guardian (London) 3/06/01

THE EDITOR AS INTRUDER: Surely the first rule of editing ought to be not getting between the reader and the book. Yet too often with editions of classic books, the editor often introduces the edition by disclosing the plot, parading his or her “potted historical knowledge and biographical take on the author,” and prescribing “whatever appraisal of the novel he or she espouses.” And it gets worse. “Editors have increasingly insisted on appearing intermittently at our elbow as we read the novel, through the device of the footnote or endnote.” Chronicle of Higher Education 03/09/01

Monday March 5

REPLACING PAPER: Paper has been the medium of communication for centuries. But now scientists are trying to improve the readability of computers so they’ll replace paper. “There is more at stake, however, than just the physical substitution of one medium for another; it will require a huge cultural shift as society struggles to give up its addiction to paper and embrace the ethereal nature of electronics. It also has far-reaching implications for books, magazines and newspapers, not to mention libraries and museums. Ours, after all, is a well paper-trained world.” Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/05/01

Sunday March 4

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN WRITERS: The modern male novelist prizes formal ingenuity, tricksiness, exuberance; flights of fancy and fireworks, that’s what his genius specialises in. No doubt as he goes along he hopes to tell us something, whether obliquely or in your face, about the Modern Predicament or the Hell that is America. The female novelist, by contrast, believes that the novel at its best creates a sort of moral poetry, in that the questions of human choice and of how life is to be lived are intrinsic to it.” The Guardian 02/28/01

Friday March 2

WRITING A WRONG: What do most authors do when they get a bad review? Well, absolutely nothing, other than maybe complaining to friends and moping. “But there’s still an enduring category of author who feels that a bad review is no mere difference of opinion, however ill-informed and wrongheaded the reviewer’s take may be. It’s an injustice that must be remedied.” But, calling critics at home? Offering bounties? Threatening legal recourse? Come on… Salon 3/02/01

A LAWSUIT OVER E-BOOKS – IT WON’T BE THE LAST: Did you think the Napster legal fracas was nasty and confusing? Wait until the book publishers get into it. And they’re about to. RosettaBooks is publishing e-versions of novels by Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Random House says it didn’t give permission. RosettaBooks says Vonnegut and Styron gave permission. Random House is suing. CBC 03/01/01

WHO READS THE MOST? THE SCOTS: A survey in Britain shows Scots read one and a half times as much as other residents of the UK. The English and Welsh average four hours a week or less, the Scottish nearly six. “Backing up the survey’s findings, organisers said that libraries in the Scottish Highlands lent more books per head of population than the rest of the United Kingdom.” ABC (Reuters) 03/01/01

THE ORIGINAL SWINGING SUPERHERO: Few people read Edgar Rice Burroughs today, but his books about Tarzan of the Apes once were staples of American popular culture. “In the first half of the 20th century, the most widely read American author was Burroughs, whose… 74 novels have sold more than 100 million copies.” Not bad for a man who took up writing in his late thirties because he couldn’t make a living as a pencil sharpener salesman. Smithsonian 03/01

Thursday March 1

MAGAZINES GOING POSTAL OVER MAIL COSTS: Last year, magazine publishers endured a ten-percent hike in postage rates. This year, the rate increase could be thirty-percent, and the publishers aren’t going to take it any more. They’re demanding the postal service make itself more efficient and cost-effective. “They ought to implement an immediate hiring freeze and somehow they need to come to grips with the fact that their clerical workers are paid twice what their counterparts in the private sector are paid.” Inside.com 02/28/01

MIGHTY AS THE AMAZON? Stock in Amazon.com dropped Wednesday, amid rumors that the giant on-line bookseller was going to file for bankruptcy. The effect of the rumors, of course, was to push the stock down further still. Asked about the rumor, one Amazon spokesman said “I can tell you absolutely, positively that there is no truth whatsoever.” Another said, “We’ve got piles of moolah. People just don’t pay attention.” Salon (AP) 02/28/01

TOLSTOY AND THE CHURCH, STILL AT ODDS: Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy rejected the authority of the Russian Orthodox church, for which he was excommunicated. Now, a century later, his great-great-grandson Vladimir has asked the Church to forgive the novelist. The director of the Tolstoy Museum thinks it’s a bad idea: “Tolstoy never repented, nor would he have approved of his descendant’s drive to reunite him with the church.” The Church so far has made no definitive reply. Vancouver Sun 02/28/01

Wednesday February 28

• MAKING HIS OWN STATEMENT: When Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last fall, it was widely viewed by the English-speaking press as a political slap in the face of Beijing’s repressive rulers, who had banned Gao’s work. But this is one author who does not believe in using the power of his pen to effect change in the physical world. Instead, he calls for a “cold literature” to rise above all. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/28/01
• SO IS ARTSJOURNAL JUST A BLOG? It seems that the latest craze in personalized online news is the “blog.” Blogs are half online diary, half news clipping service, and many online addicts are forgoing the daily paper in favor of a few well-chosen blogs. Blogs is also a ridiculously fun word to say and type. Blogs blogs blogs. San Francisco Chronicle 02/28/01

Tuesday February 27

• NOTES FROM THE UNDERGOUND: A publisher has set up vending machines in the London Underground to sell paperback books. “The imprint’s crisply printed leaflets, colour-coded into series that include romance, crime and adventure, focus on authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, P G Wodehouse, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. We’re unashamedly setting out to make people feel reading these stories will be an improving experience.” Sydney Morning Herald 02/27/01
• THE INDIES ARE BACK: Independent bookstores have been in crisis since the advent of megastores like Borders, and online warehouse services like Amazon.com. But now, many independents are reporting a resurgence, as measured in both walk-in and online clientele. Wired Radio 02/27/01 (Streaming audio file)
  • E-BOOKS GO OLD-SCHOOL: An online book publisher is running an experiment with four independent booksellers to see if old-fashioned, print-based readers will purchase an electronic version of their favorite new title. In addition to promoting the new technology, the publisher hopes the partnership will bring to light new methods of cross-promotion. Wired 02/27/01

Monday February 26

• WALKER’S LAST WORDS? Alice Walker revealed in a recent interview that her latest book, “The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart,” may in fact be her last. “I may want to do something else with the rest of my life.” The Observer (London) 2/25/01
• GIVE ME THREE: Name your three favorite female Scottish writers. Can’t do it? Well, neither could the creators of a new poster honoring “100 great Scottish writers” in which only one woman, Muriel Spark, was included. The omission has caused a stir at the Scottish Women’s committee of International Pen, which immediately produced a more inclusive poster. The Herald (Glasgow) 2/26/01

Friday February 23

• LITERATURE IN CHINA: Last year Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for his novel about life in China; the year before, Ha Jin won the National Book Award for a similar work. But what are the Chinese themselves reading? Apparently, anything they can get their hands on. “[I]magine living in a dark room with all the shades drawn. If one shade goes up – just a crack – the light that enters is suddenly very interesting. Everyone will rush to look. People in a normally lit room would find the same ray of light unremarkable.” New York Review of Books 03/08/01
• BEING POPULAR ISN’T EVERYTHING: Harry Potter may be the biggest-selling phenomenon of the past year, but his creator, JK Rowling, lost out as author of the year at this year’s British Book Awards. First place went to Nigella Lawson, who wrote a cookbook titled “How to be a Domestic Goddess.” Rowling didn’t even get the award for the best children’s book; that went to Philip Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass.” BBC 02/23/01

Thursday February 22

• DOWN WITH THE CROWN: Crown Books, which was once the third-largest bookstore chain in the US, filed for bankruptcy. “Best known as a discounter, Crown is no stranger to bankruptcy. It filed for Chapter 11 in 1998, and emerged in November 1999. In its filing in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, the company said it had assets of $75.2 million and debts of $58.9 million. Crown has more than 1,000 creditors, according to its filing.” Publishers Weekly 02/20/01
• SO MUCH FOR BEDTIME STORIES: A publisher puts out a new e-book version of “Alice in Wonderland.” One catch, though. The list of overreaching restrictions on what you can do with your copy is pretty onerous. Among them, admonitions that “This book cannot be given to someone else. This book cannot be read aloud.” Inside.com 02/21/01

Wednesday February 21

• GUARDING THE WAY IT WAS: “Wolfenbüttel, Germany is truly a small town, but it has a giant reputation in the world of humanities. Researchers gather there and come from all over the world, drawn in particular by the 17th-century collections and a remarkable library.” But when the town recently decided to add a modern extension to the library, scholars were up in arms. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02/21/01
• GAO AND OATES IN THE E-WORLD: Harper Collins wades forcefully in to e-waters, starting an electronic book imprint that will publish works by literary stars Nobel-winner Gao Xingjian and Joyce Carol Oates.” allNetDevices 02/21/01
• ADS IN MAD: There used to be two major ad-free US publications – Consumer Reports and Mad. Now there’s only one. Facing a 90 percent dip in circulation, Mad has started running the ads it once satirized. The Boston Globe 02/20/01

Tuesday February 20

• STUFFY AND OUT OF TOUCH WAS HOW WE LIKED IT: Last week’s much-anticipated launch of the “New Yorker” online (www.newyorker.com) doesn’t have everyone cheering. Oddly enough, it’s the internet-media enthusiasts who are railing the loudest. “When historians look back on the Internet Bubble, they’ll mark February 2001 as the End of Web Publishing. That’s because the Web-wary New Yorker has timed the debut of its hideous online edition to coincide with the total collapse of not just the business, but the very idea, of online journalism.” Online Journalism Review 2/16/01
  • REMNICK DEFENDS THE SITE: “New Yorker” Editor David Remnick admits the magazine’s lengthy features will strain the patience of even veteran web readers, but “to not have a Web site is, at this point, a statement that I didn’t want to make.” New York Times 2/20/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• DOES OPRAH KNOW? “McCall’s” magazine, which ceased publication with the March 2001 issue, will return to newsstands as “Rosie,” edited by, you guessed it, talk-show host and actress Rosie O’Donnell. Details are vague, but the magazine will likely attempt to make itself more distinguishable from the dozens of other similar monthlies on the rack. Less likely is the prospect of a return to “McCall’s” literary glory days in the 1920s. Washington Post 02/20/01
• SEARCHING… Remember when you had to actually go to the library or bookstore to look up an author? It’s so much easier now with search engines. Why you can slide on over to Amazon, type in the name you want and… okay, so maybe it’s not always foolproof. The Idler 02/20/01

Monday February 19

• MORRISON AT 70: Writer Toni Morrison turns 70 and her friend turn up for a party. “Even at 70, Morrison continues to astonish her readers with a lyrical agility and a grasp of imagery so keen they seem to constitute a language of their own.” Washington Post 02/19/01

Friday February 16

• ADULTS PREFER SINNING: The Harry Potter books might be monster hits with children (three of the books sit atop the most-borrowed-by-kids list at British libraries). But adults prefer the late Catherine Cookson, the most borrowed author for 18 years in a row. Her “Solace of Sin” is twice as popular as Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” BBC 02/16/01
• POETS NAMED BOB: What does it take to be named Poet Laureate of the United States? Some of the poets who have held the job: Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Hayden, and, of course, most recently Robert Pinsky. We’re sensing conspiracy here. But seriously, how is a Poet Laureate made? (crowned?) The Idler 02/16/01
• THE ENDURING DANTE: In the last 20-30 years there has been an explosion of translations of Dante. Why the enduring appeal? “His comprehensive outlook is something for which, in our fragmented and rootless modernity, many of us yearn. Yet we also identify with Dante the realist, who speaks with such unencumbered directness to us of love and loss, violence and greed, hope and injustice—and in language that is at once high and low.” The Economist 02/15/01

Wednesday February 14

• WHAT MAKES A PUBLISHER? Publishing insiders are trying to figure out the implications of last month’s firing of a Little, Bown publisher. Another sign of the creeping bottom line? Maybe not. “You see, the trick in glass-tower publishing isn’t just choosing good books, or even vibrating to popular tastes, though that’s surely important. It’s not enough to be right. You have to be able to work the system.” New York Magazine 02/12/01
• AMBIVALENCE OF SUCCESS: Dave Eggers’ book “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is about to be released in paperback. It’s been acclaimed and much pondered since its release last year. But “he dreaded returning to it, he writes, ‘like one dreads seeing a bad-smelling distant elderly relative lying prone in a rank and wrong nursing home.’ Just weeks before the paperback’s publication yesterday, he half seriously asked his editors at Vintage Books if they could call the whole thing off.” The New York Times 02/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• INVALID VALEDICTORY: You may have seen a poem identified as the “farewell letter” of Gabriel García Márquez circulating on the Internet. It’s poignant, because García Márquez has lymphatic cancer. It’s galling, because he didn’t write it. “[N]ot once during his long and distinguished literary career has Gabriel García Márquez ever written poetry.” Brill’s Content 02/09/01
• RUSHDIE STILL THREATENED: The edict threatening the life of Salman Rushdie seemed to fade for a few years. Now a hardline Iranian newspaper is again calling for Rushdie’s murder. “The daily said in an editorial that Rushdie’s move to the United States would make his killing easier…. [T]he country’s main military force issued a statement saying the death sentence against Rushdie still stands.” Salon (AP) 01/13/01
• THE [ONLINE] NEW YORKER: It wasn’t the same under Tina Brown as it was under Harold Ross, but The New Yorker has often been regarded as the best magazine around. The best print magazine, that is. How will it stack up against the competition on the Internet? It’s finally here. Take a look. The New Yorker 02/14/01

Tuesday February 13

• XPUNGING XCESS AT XLIBRIS: The self-publisher Xlibris promised the future of publishing – the ability for anyone who wrote a book to get it published professionally – publishing on demand. But layoffs are expected early next week, and the Random House imprint will also restructure its business plan, scrapping plans to expand to Europe. Inside.com 02/12/01

Monday February 12

• 300 BOOKS: Being a judge for the National Book Awards is an honor. But also a chore when the 300 books arrive at your door. “To keep up with the grueling schedule the judges had been set, I read nonstop, pausing only to jot down notes and questions before picking up a new book. I’d immerse myself in the worlds of the novels until words ran together. When I closed a book, sometimes it took me a moment to remember where I was. It was a reading experience unlike any I’d ever undertaken, even during graduate school at Berkeley.” The New York Times 02/12/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday February 9

• REPORTING OUR HISTORY: Random House has hired a couple of reporters to dig into the publisher’s history and interview its employees. ”We have a strong feeling that we’ve got a rich tradition to recount that will be of interest and maybe of practical instruction for ourselves and maybe a wider universe of people.” Inside.com 02/08/01
• GIVING VOICE: Minneapolis and St. Paul are home to the nation’s largest Hmong population, most of whom settled in Minnesota in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Largely ignored until recently, Hmong artists are beginning to be featured prominently, and a local arts journal is leading the charge. St. Paul Pioneer Press 02/09/01

Thursday February 8

• WHO COULD SCARE A PUBLISHER? A LIBRARIAN, OF COURSE: Publishers sell books. Their natural enemies are librarians. With images of Napster clouding the bottom-line, publishers have hired a new white knight, former US Congressperson Pat Schroeder. “They’re terrified,” she says of publishers. “Technology people never gave their stuff away. But now folks are saying, ‘You mean the New England Journal of Medicine is charging people?’ ” Washington Post 02/07/01

Wednesday February 7

• ONLINE KING: Stephen King stopped writing his on-line novel “The Plant” because not enough people were paying for it. Or because he was too busy with other projects. Or because the six completed parts can stand alone. “In my view, ‘The Plant’ has been quite successful,” he said, revealing it had netted him $463,832.27. The Ottawa Citizen (CP) 02/07/01
• DO WE NEED ELASTIC NOVELS, OR FLEXIBLE CRITICS? A lot of critics thought Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” was too long. Not John Leonard. “All DeLillo did was to dream the whole repressed history of American cold war culture, from J. Edgar Hoover to AIDS. If you are too lazy for nomadic wandering in such a brilliant maze, stick to stock quotations.” DeLillo’s back with another, shorter novel, and Leonard’s here again to defend him. New York Review of Books 02/22/01

Tuesday February 6

• AN URBAN AFFAIR: A new book on the 21^st-century city by professor Joseph Rykwer explores just what makes the world’s best cities so seductive, and the worst so unlivable. “[Rykwer] makes the same point as the Seattle rioters in a rather gentler and more erudite way. His civilised anger is directed against traffic engineers and planners who, in seeing a city merely as a set of functional problems, ignore its poetic nature. Their exercise is ultimately self-defeating as, if cities lose their emotional raison d’être, it’s irrelevant how smoothly the traffic flows.” London Evening Standard 2/05/01

Monday February 5

• THE BIG WHIFF: “Almost any substantial work of fiction or nonfiction that doesn’t become a bestseller qualifies as a midlist book, one that doesn’t make the ‘front’ of a publisher’s seasonal list of upcoming titles. It probably sells somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 hardcover copies (writers whose sales sink below that may have trouble finding commercial publishers) and a high of 20,000 to 25,000. Beyond the numbers, however, the word ‘midlist’ has acquired a stigma, an unnerving whiff of low sales expectations.” Washington Post 02/04/01
• A MATTER OF AUTHORSHIP: Nega Mezlekia, an engineer living in Toronto, ought to have been flying high after his memoir “Notes From the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood,” was cheered by critics and won a prominent Canadian literary award. But another writer has come forward to say that she wrote much of the book and wants some of the credit. Lawsuits are flying. The New York Times 02/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• E-BOOK EVOLUTION: Last week, Random House launched its e-book imprint, with several high-profile authors contributing new electronic-only titles. Now, several veteran publishing figures have announced the impending arrival of Rosetta Books, an online e-publisher of backlisted literature. Publishers’ Weekly 02/05/01

Sunday February 4

• YOUNG LIABILITY: Literary prizes shed only a vague light on what constitutes enduring talent. What is it that lit prizes have against young writers? The Telegraph (London) 02/03/01
• SAVED BY THE PRIZE: Matthew Kneale was struggling as a writer before he won the Whitbread awrd last week. “If the novel had sunk without trace, it would have been a body blow, both financial and psychological, from which he might never have recovered. Now suddenly he is soaring. On such happy accidents – or bold gambles, depending which way you look at it – careers turn.” The Telegraph (London) 02/03/01

Friday February 2

• NEXT CHAPTER(S)? Who’s going to buy Canadian book superstore Chapters? And why do they want the money-losing chain? The tender offers are being mailed out. CBC 02/01/01
• RANDOM HOUSE TAKES THE E-PLUNGE: Random House has become the first publisher to officially launch an E-books-only imprint. “At Random” will publish 20 original titles to start with, ranging from writing collections to celebrity biographies to serious fiction. The titles will also be available as “print-on-demand” paperbacks, but will not be sold in traditional bookstores. CBC 02/02/01

Thursday February 1

• QUALITY IS OVERRATED: An Oakland-based web site is pushing the notion that anyone can write a book, and is sponsoring periodic “National Novel Writing Months” with an eye towards churning out as many full-length narratives as possible. Anyone can participate, and anyone who reaches a 50,000 word count is judged a “winner.” One past winner advises, “Write as if nobody will read it, ever.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 01/31/01
• NEW CLASSICS: New translations of literary classics come out every year, and it can be hard to remember just why we need them. “Well, why do we need another recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? The thing to remember about the classics is that different aspects of a work emerge as important at different times, so there’s never going to be one translation that stops everyone in their tracks and says, ‘This is it.’” New York Times 2/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday January 31

• AND I CHARGE $50 AN HOUR: The Australian book publishing world is talking about a well-known editor who is suing a first-time author – a former client – for editing fees. Sydney Morning Herald 01/31/01

Tuesday January 30

• ANNA REVISITED: In Russia, a new rewritten updated verion of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” has critics outraged. The story has been turned into “an 80-page cartoon strip with lurid illustrations that owe more to Judge Dredd than Tolstoy. And to make the drama more immediate, the artists have jettisoned the backdrop of late 19th-century high society in favour of 1990s Russia. Anna and Vronsky’s liaison no longer develops in salons and ballrooms but sushi bars and strip clubs, alongside characters who cut lines of coke with their credit cards and send billet doux in the form of text messages.” Books Unlimited 01/30/01 
• THE SHARIN’ OF THE GREEN. Some fifty books of Irish interest are due for publication on or about St. Patrick’s Day. Much of the credit goes to Frank McCourt, for “Angela’s Ashes” and “Tis”. But there’s more than McCourt in the recent success of Irish and Irish-like writers. “[T]he Irish-American of today reads more than his immigrant forebears, and… you don’t have to be Irish to like a good Irish story.” Publishers Weekly 01/29/01
• NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALISTS: were announced Monday. Jacques Barzun (“From Dawn to Decadence”), Zadie Smith (“White Teeth”), and Amy Bloom (“A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You”) were among the nominees. New York Times (AP)1/30/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• THE ONLINE NEW YORKER: The New Yorker magazine has made a deal with Microsoft and Barnes & Noble to publish e-books. And while most Conde Nast magazines have had their websites postponed to later this summer, the New Yorker was granted special dispensation to hit the web in February. Variety 01/30/01

Monday January 29

• ANCIENT WONDER REBORN: It took 11 years and £120 million the project to rebuild Alexandria Library, “the most famous library of all time in one of the world’s poorest countries. That was the legendary library founded by Alexander the Great and built by his Greek general, Ptolemy I, King of Egypt and his son Ptolemy II, Shelley’s Ozymandias.” The Guardian (London) 01/29/01
• WRITER JAILED FOR HIS WORK: An Egyptian court has sentenced writer Salah-Eddine Mohsen to three years in jail for “among other things, writing that the Quran, Islam’s holy book, was outdated. But during the trial he told the court that he was a believer and that he did not mean to offend Islam or negate its basic tenets in his writings.” Nando Times (AP) 01/29/01
• NEW AGE OF SPANISH LIT: “After years of notorious conservatism, Hispanic literary studies is finally catching up. The whole idea of a “golden age” of great Spanish writers – Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon – is now under scrutiny. Finally welcoming feminism, new historicism, gender theory, and cultural studies, professors of Spanish are asking new questions about those old eminences: For whom were the 16th and 17th centuries a golden age?” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/29/01

Sunday January 28

• WHO INVENTED THE PRINTING PRESS? If you answered Gutenberg, you’d be wrong say researchers. “Two scholars contend that the metal mold method of printing attributed to Gutenberg was probably invented by someone else about 20 years after Gutenberg printed his Bible.” New York Times 01/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday January 26

• 50 YEARS OF “CATCHER”, ON THE SLY: J.D. Salinger’s classic novel of teen angst marks its fiftieth anniversary in 2001. But naturally, you won’t be hearing a word out of the famously hermitlike author. Nor will the publisher of “Catcher in the Wry” be making a huge marketing push, since Salinger has a habit of suing people who dare to speak of him in public. But the nation’s bookstores will certainly take notice. Nando Times (AP), 1/25/01

Wednesday January 24

• MATTHEW KNEALE WINS WHITBREAD Book of the Year Prize for his novel “English Passengers,” a story of a group of British colonialists in Tasmania. BBC 1/24/01
  • AN INTERVIEW WITH KNEALE : “I think people will always disagree on whether prizes go to the right books but the very fact that there is a debate will encourage people to read good books whether they’re on a list or not.” The Guardian (London) 1/18/01 [Text and Real audio clips]
• LOST AND FOUND: The original manuscript of Céline’s masterpiece, “Journey to the End of the Night” – which has been missing for more than 50 years and hotly pursued by French researchers – has been discovered by a Parisian bookseller. The manuscript, written in black ink and crayon, was last seen in 1943 when the ill and destitute Céline sold it for a pittance. “Its reappearance, after 50 years of mystery, is a literary bomb, as explosive as the book’s original publication in 1932.” The Guardian (London) 1/23/01
• POET MICHAEL LONGLEY WINS T.S. ELIOT PRIZE for his collection “The Weather in Japan.” The award is given each year to the best collection of new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. CBC 1/23/01

Tuesday January 23

• E-PUBLISHING LIVES: Is e-publishing dead? “Despite recent reports that there has been little change in readers’ reluctance to accept e-books, Fictionwise seems to be proving – at least with short fiction in the horror/sci-fi/mystery genres – that there is indeed a viable market.” Wired 01/2301
• THE NEW SYNERGY: Electronics retailer Future Shop will buy Canadian book superstore Chapters. “Future Shop’s friendly deal to buy Chapters is undoubtedly the next wave of synergy. Makes you wonder why Canadian Tire doesn’t buy Tiffany’s so you don’t have to schlep to two stores for antifreeze and diamonds.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/23/01

Monday January 22

• TWAIN TURNS UP: An unpublished Mark Twain manuscript turns up and The New Yorker and The Atlantic magazines vie to publish it. “It would be wrong to say that this is the missing masterpiece of Mark Twain. But it was written after `Tom Sawyer,’ and it anticipates `Huck Finn,’ and it is charming and interesting and very much in the Twain tradition.” The New York Times 01/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• RESCUE OR RIPOFF? “For 30 years, ‘Books In Canada’ provided reviews, author interviews and commentary on Canadian literature until it stopped publishing in early 2000 because of financial difficulty. Amazon.com stepped in this week and announced it would sponsor publication of 10 issues of the magazine in 2001 and 12 issues in 2002. But instead of receiving congratulations, the e-tailer’s announcement has been greeted with outrage.” Wired 01/19/01
• LITTLE HOUSE ROYALTIES: A Missouri judge has ruled that a rural state library has a claim to the lucrative copyrights for two “Little House on the Prairie” books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. “The ruling is the latest in a dispute about who owns the rights to one of the best-selling series of children’s books in history. Publishing experts have estimated the value of royalties from Wilder’s estate in the tens of millions of dollars.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/22/01

Sunday January 21

• SO WHAT IF YOU’RE DEAD: Six years after playwright John Osborne died, his widow has received a demand from her husband’s publisher requesting “repayment of the full figure of the advance – £20,000 – that Osborne had been paid for the third volume of his autobiography.” The Observer (London) 01/21/01

Friday January 19

• NO PEACE FOR PAZ: The legacy of one of Mexico’s most famous and revered writers, Octavio Paz is being hindered by a feud between the late Nobel author’s widow and the historian hired to head oup the Paz Foundation. “These days the two barely speak and their feud has become the talk of Mexico. At stake is the legacy of one of Mexico’s icons, its only Nobel Prize winner (in 1990) in literature.” Washington Postr 01/18/01

Thursday January 18

• THE YEAR IN BOOKS: Okay, so it’s another book awards list – but this is one you probably don’t want to be on: Barnes & Noble wins one for its tactic of having its lawyers pressure a group of New England booksellers to ”cease and desist’ from using the word ‘discover’ in their advertising. B & N said they owned exclusive rights to the word because they’d used it first. The company backed down after three weeks of intensive ridicule in the trade press.” The Idler 01/18/01
• LITERARY FORENSICS: Don Foster first came to prominence when he devined, upon close reading, that a dull poem he had found in the UCLA library had been written by Shakespeare. Since then he has been called on to determine authorship of a ragtag collection of texts – from the “anonymous” of “Primary Colors” to notes in the Theodore Kaczynski criminal trial and JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation. Village Voice 01/17/01

Wednesday January 17

• A CELEBRATION OF WHAT? As part of inauguration week, the new president’s wife Laura holds a lunch to celebrate America’s writers. And who is invited? “These are America’s best authors? Or most representative, or most important, or even most reactionary? No, on all counts. Instead they’re a few decent writers, two hacks (apolitical for a change, in Washington) and a baker’s dozen of writers for everybody’s favorite readership, kids.” San Francisco Chronicle 01/17/01
• HOW TO UPDATE A CLASSIC: The 144-year-old Atlantic Monthly, with a venerated history of publishing some of America’s finest literary talent (including Emerson and Thoreau), is trying hard to adapt to the harsh realities of putting out a magazine in the 21^st century. “If you are Michael Kelly, the editor in chief, you have a dual mission, which is to light a bonfire without scaring readers off the hearth.” New York Times 1/17/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesdsay January 16

• DROWNING WATER: The winner of this year’s Canadian literary Award for Poetry. Saturday Night 01/13/01
• BACK AT CORPORATE:Consolidations and mergers in the publishing business have been rampant. “The pace of change is like a runaway train, not only with merger upon merger but with a not-so-gradual shift from editorial (with complementary sales-centered) philosophies to financial-growth and marketing-centered ones. At times in recent decades the struggle between the editorial-minded and the fiscal-minded has seemed like trench warfare.” MediaChannel 12/00
• CHILDREN’S LIT. AWARDS: The Newbery and Caldecott medals for children’s literature (often referred to as the “Pulitzer Prizes of children’s books”) were awarded today to Richard Peck and David Small. New York Times 1/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday January 15

• WHAT’S THE ATTRACTION? “America’s best-selling poet is a 13th-century Persian mystic, who often danced while reciting to his disciples. Now he is whirling circles around Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman. Jalal al-Din Rumi composed more than 70,000 lines of verse about love and desire and the human condition before his death in 1273.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/15/01
• EVERYONE’S AN AUTHOR: As publishing electronically becomes more popular, more “authors” go online. One consequence: book reviewers are being inundated by those wanting their book reviewed. One guy wrote ”a thinly-disguised revenge book directed at his former boss who fired him. He told me in a follow-up telephone call that he had a terminal illness and wanted to see the book reviewed before he died. I didn’t review it, so he took an ad out in the paper saying ‘Read the book that the Democrat-Gazette refuses to review’.” Athens Daily News (Georgia) 01/15/01

Thursday January 11

• REJECTED WITH DIGINTY: A new website celebrates the rejection letters writers get from publishers and editors. “I want people to be immunized about rejection. Just because someone says the most demeaning, horrible things to you doesn’t mean it’s true.” The New York Times 01/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• BLACK LIKE ME: “One of the more invigorating happenings in the industry in recent years has been the emergence of black readers as an economic force. Or, more precisely, the recognition that blacks are such a power. There are, for instance, five new or relatively new imprints in major publishing houses devoted to fiction and nonfiction by black writers on black subjects.” The New York Times 01/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday January 10

• THE POET AS A YOUNG MAN: At 95, recently-appointed American Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz has had a long and distinguished career. But in his early years, working as a reporter and in the obscurer reaches of publishing, Kunitz lived mostly outside the poetry world, and entirely outside academia. It would be easy to credit this for the lack of notice the early poems received, but the truth is that most of them weren’t very good.” Boston Review 01/01

Monday January 8

• THE FUTURE NO ONE WANTS? Everyone’s talking about e-books and how they’re the future of publishing. Just one problem: “They’re new; they’re hot; they’re ready to revolutionize reading! Yet almost nobody will touch them.” Washington Post 01/08/01

Friday January 5

• CHAIN GANG: The head of the company trying to make a hostile takeover of Canada’s Chapters book superstore chain has charged the book retailer with “improper disclosure and insider dealing.” He claims that Canada has an “overcapacity” in the book retailing business and that his company’s takeover of Chapters would mean that “shareholders, book publishers and consumers would win through a merger of the two companies.” National Post (Canada) 01/05/01

Thursday January 4

• TURF WAR: “While publishers are seeking to sell electronic books directly to readers, Barnesandnoble.com is trying to cut out the publisher by acquiring rights directly from authors and releasing their electronic books. Both sides are investing heavily, although no one knows whether electronic books, downloaded and read on computer screens, will ever catch on.” New York Times 01/04/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• PRINT THIS: Everyone talks about the changing role of publishers in an e-book world. But what about printers? “E-books will become an increasing threat to traditional books as e-book devices improve and decline in price. Digitization will free book content for other uses. Successful printers will look for opportunities to be a part of this process, becoming “publishing partners, not just printers.” Publishers Weekly 01/02/01
• WHITBREAD WINNERS/FINALISTS ANNOUNCED: Winners for best novel: Matthew Kneale, for poetry: John Burnside, for first novel: Zadie Smith, and biography: Lorna Sage. The four are shortlisted for the the main prize of Book of the Year – and the £22,500 prize money – to be announced later this month. BBC 01/04/01

Wednesday January 3

• CHANGING ECONOMICS? “Everyone concerned with literature wants to know what is going to happen to the homely old trade of book publishing in the Era of the Net.” For one thing, maybe “brand name authors no longer need publishers; and more controversially maybe some publishing houses might have better balance sheets if they didn’t have to pony up the immense sums paid to these brand names – $64 million, was it, to Mary Higgins Clark?” The New Republic 12/28/00

Tuesday January 2

• LEFTOVERS, REJECTS, REMAINDERS, WHATEVER: “What do you do with the thousands of surplus copies of a big book that bombs? That question is on the minds of many publishers this week as they survey the results of the holiday season amid signs that books may not be immune to the sluggish sales at other retail stores. And in the uniquely politicized climate of the book business, rife with tensions among publishers, bookstore chains and smaller stores, how publishers try to unload the unwanted volumes can be a touchy subject.” New York Times 01/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• PINSKY TAKES POETRY TO PROS: Former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky has taken poetry to the people with his Favorite Poem Project. But until now he’s “steered clear of English professors as he evangelized for poetry among the American people, assembling his collection of poems from some 25,000 submissions by ordinary citizens.” But last week he took his project to the annual convention of academic critics and scholars of the Modern Languages Association, “a shift from the marketplace, towards the academy, from the public square, to the ivory tower, and might have contained a hint of intellectual danger in earlier days.” The Idler 01/01/01