Anybody checked out Newsweek’s book section lately? I always think of the magazine as existing primarily to keep Time company on my aunt and uncle’s coffee table, but this week’s book features were fun enough to warrant a bookmark. David Gates has written an eclectic ramble on the pleasures of rereading; they’ve put together a list of 50 books that would keep you happy if you happened to swear off new books and small presses for a year; there’s an excerpt from E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley, one of my most anticipated books of the fall; and a series of “best books” by nine authors that would be entirely skippable if you didn’t need to stop for a moment and appreciate the fact that Melissa Gilbert’s first pick for Best Hollywood Novel is Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With the Band. Best of the bunch is editor Jon Meacham’s cheerful panel of six authors who have actual chemistry on the page and seem to be enjoying themselves. A look at the masthead turns up no Books Editor — I’m guessing this new push is Meacham’s initiative. At any rate, it’s a good one, and the coffee table appreciates it.

In the name of preserving at least a tatter of indie cred, I also need make sure everyone knows about NewPages, a super portal for literary and alternative magazines and reviews, independent and university presses, indie bookstores, and writers’ resources. Their blog is worth subscribing to as well — if you Canadian folk don’t know that there’s a new literature and art sex magazine out of Carleton University called The Moose and Pussy, then something’s wrong.

Via the Guardian, we have a list of Edward Hogan’s Top 10 Out-Of-Town Tales - stories set in or featuring rural and small-town landscapes. I’m surprised to see a book about the ‘burbs, though…don’t they count as city space? Hogan tacks The Ice Storm by Rick Moody onto his list:

“The sections about Wendy, the Hoods’ teenage daughter, make me nostalgic, because they show the spooky beauty of nature lurking at suburban doors. Wendy gets her kicks in the graveyard and the meadows by the “funny farm”. The creek runs under her patio. Nature will not be stomped down.”

I guess. I grew up in the suburbs outside of Toronto - the amorphous ‘metro Toronto area’ - and I don’t think I’d characterize them as ‘not in the big city.’ Kind of on the edges, but if you can hear a four hundred series highway from the backyard, I think, you’re still attached to the city. You’re in burb land. The official flower of burb land? The purple petunia.

Then again, nature does seem to be striking back. Yeesh. Watch out for the moose.

As if the 1300+ pages of A Suitable Boy wasn’t enough, Indian novelist and poet Vikram Seth is set to write a sequel.

To be titled A Suitable Girl, the story will pick up in the present, not in 1952 where the story left off. Said Seth:

That allows me in a sense to bring a whole lot of post-independence history to bear on the novel. It allows me to live in the present.

I’m doing something quite different to keep myself interested rather than just writing another historical book that I’ve written before. I hope it can be read by a person who hasn’t read the other book as well as by people who have.

Although A Suitable Boy took 10 years to write, Seth plans to have the new novel ready for a 2013 pub date.

Via Reuters

I have this theory. It’s that three little things (and none of them are “the man”) are keeping us from true gender equality, and yes, perhaps even personal fulfillment. They are, in no particular order:

1. Jodi Picoult;

“In Bedminster, N.J., 15 women have banded together to form the Jodi Picoult Book Club. They read only Jodi Picoult books. ‘It’s hard sometimes,’ says founder Anne Marie Verdiramo, of the emotional turmoil. ‘They’re so gripping. . . . She brings up so many issues you never thought about.’”

2. Self-help books;

“And in 2008, women purchased 74% of books sold in the relationship and family category, according to book consumer trends tracker R.R. Bowker.

What gives? Underneath the powerful confident career woman is there really just a desperate neurotic who hopelessly chases, is married to or is separating from a jerky guy?”

3. Bridal showers.

I haven’t found corroborating evidence for the untold evils of #3 yet, but I will. Oh, I will.

I’m out of here for Ireland, my shadowy minions. Not before a bit of my trademark intrigue/buffoonery: I went to print boarding passes late last night only to find out my passport was expired. … … … … As my friend Pete said, Only you, Murray.

Anyway, suffice it to say, I have discovered yet ANOTHER reason living in St. John’s, Newfoundland rocks the Casbah: no lineups at the passport office. I’ll have a new one by 3pm. And then I’m gone. I see my winged monkeys have already been busy keeping you distracted while we pilfer your valuables entertained, so my work here is done. You better hope someone doesn’t offer me a job over there. Because between the Irish respect for artists and the fact that there’s no internet there, I might just stay. What? There IS internet? Crap.

Aaaaand because if-you-were-a-girl-I’d-pull-your-pigtails-and-show-you-this-to-gross-you-out-
and-keep-you-from-thinking-I-love-you-which-I-do….

The moment you’ve all been waiting for: the results of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have just been released. The contest celebrates some seriously wretched writing.

The winner.

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

A gem.

Their relationship hit a bump in the road, not the low, graceful kind of bump, reminiscent of a child’s choo choo train-themed roller coaster, rather the kind of tall, narrow speed-bump that, if a school bus ran over it, would cause even a fat kid to fly up and bang his head on the ceiling.

Stay tuned for possible contest. (I’m just waiting for George to leave before I promise prizes on his behalf.)

(Via BookBrunch)

The recession has served as a wake-up call, finally the time is here for the publishing industry to re-evaluate its business practices.

Plaguing the industry for years has been the habit of offering massive advances up-front for the next Harry Potter or Twiligh-esque blockbuster, advances that rarely pay out, hurting both author and publisher.

Writer John Green delivers the final blow to that house of cards by doing the math. Straight-up, larger royalties and smaller advances are a win-win situation for both sides:

Let’s say that The Unicornians [ed: sample fictional YA book] is not a tremendous success. The first book in the trilogy sells 8,000 copies in hardcover; the second two sell 6,000. With Editor 1, the author gets her $300,000, but The Unicornians comes up $240,000 short of earning out. With Editor 2, the author only makes $80,000 on the series, but $50,000 of that is royalty, and the publisher has also made a (modest) profit. The publisher will likely ask the author for another series, perhaps something focused in on the werewolf dude…

Okay, so now let’s say The Unicornians IS successful. Let’s say the first book sells 250,000 copies in hardcover, because they make a movie, and teens squeal about how hot the unicornian boy’s horn looks. The second and third books also sell 250,000. With Editor 1’s deal, the author earns back her advance and makes $1.2 million, for a total of 1.5 million dollars. With Editor 2’s deal, the author earns out and makes $2.7 million in royalties, for a total of $3 million.

Green also dispels the myth that big advances lead to big marketing budgets and thus obscene sales numbers.

So if an editor thinks highly enough of a book to pay $100,000 for it, she probably still likes it enough to give it a big marketing push when it comes time for publication.

Big advances do not cause big marketing budgets. Expectation of sales cause big marketing budgets (and often cause big advances). This is why turning down money will not hurt your marketing budget, if a publisher is behaving rationally.

Via BoingBoing

Oprah may think James Frey is scum (though apparently they reconciled) but the man knows how to work the system. After being crowned with the albatross of discrediting worthy memoirs everywhere, he managed to rally with a seven figure deal with Harper for Bright Shiny Morning.

Last week, the New York Times outed Frey as the co-writer of four YA books that his agent, Eric Siminoff, was originally pitching to large US publishing houses as a collaboration between two unnamed writers, one of them happening to be a NYT best-selling author.

The first book titled I Am Number Four is to be part of a six part series. The premise seems to revolve around a group of teen aliens, a nice break from sexy vampires and faeries I do think.

It’s now been announced that Harper has bought the first four books in the series for under seven figures total.

The genius here lies in the fact that Frey has employed the help of recent Columbia writing program grad and complete unknown Jobie Hughes who will be responsible for doing the majority of the writing. It gets even better - Dreamworks has already bought the film rights to the series with Michael Bay set to produce/direct. James Frey is now laughing at you from his bathtub of money, calling poor Hughes to harass him about plot devices. “I said more outrageous surgery without painkillers, Jobie! Give the people what they want!”

The original NYT piece also deserves to be read as it could easily be a hall of famer from the staff at The Onion.

After granting a temporary restraining order last month, a United States District Court judge has ruled against Swedish author Frederik Colting and his Catcher in the Rye sequel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Colting, writing under the name John David California, is now prohibited from publishing, advertising or distributing the book in the United States.

There’s been plenty of talk lately about shifts in the concept of intellectual property and copyright laws, but that’s not what’s happening here. Colting maintains that the book was intended as a parody, yet the court found “such contentions to be post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original, rather than reasonably perceivable parody.” In other words, in the judge’s eyes 60 Years Later doesn’t work as satire, and is therefore in violation of Salinger’s copyright. Essentially, the court is seeing fit to rule on the quality of a writer’s work, whether he pulled off what he claims he intended to — and since the intent can’t be proved, all that’s left to go by is the execution. And what you’re left with, when you start mandating skill, is censorship.

There’s a lively discussion going on in the Comments section of the New York Times City Room article on the case, invoking the ongoing germination of art, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Picasso, and the general act of standing on the shoulders of giants. Me, I’m looking at my copy of Catcher, a New American Library paperback from 1962 that’s been held together with masking tape so long it’s become part of the cover. And right there on the title page is a blurb from the Book-of-the-Month Club News, telling you that the book “will recall to many the comedies and tragedies of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen.” That novel is in the public domain now, and I have no idea if Tarkington renewed the 1916 copyright when it expired. He died in 1946, though, five years before Salinger published his book, so we’ll never know if he would have thought Holden Caulfield strayed just a bit too close to Seventeen’s William:

William Sylvanus Baxter paused for a moment of thought in front of the drug-store at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue. He had an internal question to settle before he entered the store: he wished to allow the young man at the soda-fountain no excuse for saying, “Well, make up your mind what it’s goin’ to be, can’t you?” Rudeness of this kind, especially in the presence of girls and women, was hard to bear, and though William Sylvanus Baxter had borne it upon occasion, he had reached an age when he found it intolerable. Therefore, to avoid offering opportunity for anything of the kind, he decided upon chocolate and strawberry, mixed, before approaching the fountain. Once there, however, and a large glass of these flavors and diluted ice-cream proving merely provocative, he said, languidly—an affectation, for he could have disposed of half a dozen with gusto: “Well, now I’m here, I might as well go one more. Fill ‘er up again. Same.”

Emerging to the street, penniless, he bent a fascinated and dramatic gaze upon his reflection in the drug-store window, and then, as he turned his back upon the alluring image, his expression altered to one of lofty and uncondescending amusement. That was his glance at the passing public. From the heights, he seemed to bestow upon the world a mysterious derision—for William Sylvanus Baxter was seventeen long years of age, and had learned to present the appearance of one who possesses inside information about life and knows all strangers and most acquaintances to be of inferior caste, costume, and intelligence.

What do you think? I think dead authors don’t sue, and rich famous ones have the luxury of playing fast and loose with the First Amendment. I really hope Colting contests.

Sorry. George didn’t leave me keys to media. He said something about a Rottweiler that needed feed thrice daily and pop in the fridge…and no boyfriends over after eleven, but nothing about being banned from linking videos. Huh.

Happy Canada Day! In the spirit of great Canadiana, I give you the Log Driver’s Waltz. To reenact the true Canadian child’s experience of the film, sit cross-legged on the floor in corduroy pants and running shoes (and a turtleneck, of course..!).

[Fixed courtesy of George who hasn't left yet...]

For anyone out there who still cares, there’s now a backlash to the Google Settlement backlash. Last week, some dude over at Slate’s The Big Money enjoined us to ignore the “dystopian monopoly-mongers.” And now,  the president of OUP is singing the Settlement’s praises.

It provides a means whereby those lost books of the last century can be brought back to life and made searchable, discoverable, and citable. That aim aligns seamlessly with the aims of a university press. It is good for readers, authors, and publishers — and, yes, for Google. If it succeeds, readers will gain access to an unprecedented amount of previously lost material, publishers will get to disseminate their work — and earn a return from their past investments — and authors will find new readers (and royalties). If it fails, the majority of lost books will be unlikely ever to see the light of day, which would constitute an enormous setback for scholarly communication and education.

But he’s not completely seduced.

To be clear, as noted above, the settlement is certainly not perfect and the solution to dealing with orphan works is particularly problematic: Google should not have the exclusive ability to exploit those works, and further refinement is needed to ensure that the Book Rights Registry can license those titles to others besides Google.

Did everyone else already know this story?*

“… Richard Ford once shot up one of Hoffman’s books after she ‘wrote nasty things’ when she reviewed his work for the New York Times…Ford’s run-in with Hoffman, with whom he shared a publisher, has become legendary. In retaliation for her criticism, Ford shot a hole through her latest book and posted it to her.”

Jay-sus. All reviewers be warned: novelists clearly have some anger issues, and they’re packing. Perhaps a policy of reviewing only authors who pack Twitter accounts rather than actual handguns might be in order. Do publishers currently share that kind of information in their publicity materials?

*Thanks to Bookslut for the link.

It may be hot and sunny outside but the literary offerings this time of year are less than blistering. Thankfully, it appears that fall is planning on bringing something to the table other the frigid reality of the Canadian climate.

The Millions very neatly rounds up the hottest reads on the fall list. Atwood makes the cut for her un-prequel or ‘simultaneouel‘, The Year of the Flood . We’ll also be seeing heavyweights John Irving with Last Night In Twisted River, William Trevor with Love and Summer and J.M. Coetzee with Summertime. You have to hand it to the US - not a sepia cover in sight.

My picks: R.Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis (he should have collaborated with Jonathan Goldstein for the ultimate twisted biblical re-telling) and a fur-covered literary novelization by Dave Eggers of forthcoming Spike Jonze film Where The Wild Things Are. Rad.

NinjaHeather here, cat lady extraordinaire. George is busy packing and swearing at his computer at the moment.

So…Alice Hoffman? Girl? Seriously? Author Blasts Critic With a Tweet…unhappy with a NYT review of her book, Hoffman took to Twitter. Because everybody knows that the best way to vent your spleen is openly, in public, and on the internet. The Twitter feed is, not surprisingly, deleted…but fortunately, you can relive the moment in cache-land, over and over and over again.

Hoffman later released the following statement through her publisher:

“Of course, I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review, which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions, and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.”

Translated to tweet-speak:

“OMG epic fail.”

Before I get to the announcement, I’d like to take a few half hours to ruminate on what it means to be a “Ninja”, and further to that, a ninja of the “Bookish” persuasion. From the earliest days of feudal Japan the ninja… Oh, okay.

In no particular order:

The Effen-vescent Demo Expert Bronwyn Kienapple

Elite Forces’ Lisa “For the Love of” Peet

The Upper North Side’s Literary Mobster Menachem Kaiser

Intel expert Sarah “You can prove anything with Statz” Cords

and…

Heather the Cat Lady

Also joining them, by supra-electoral fiat, will be experienced ‘Ninja Robert “Don’t Do Crack” Wiersema, whom I removed from the voting early on when I realized I wanted to ensure his sour, puckered personality would be there to maintain a tone consistent with the charter of rights and lefts of our great Bookninja nation state, Acerbia.

This whole process was difficult for me, because over the course of several days all the candidates have become like children to me, and each one came very close. Seriously, in some cases those not blogging missed out by under 10 votes. Heartbreaking, I know. But the people have spoken. And there’s always next year. I briefly considered throwing it all to hell and letting everyone blog, but that would just be a mess. It’s already going to be hard to find six sets of matching shackles to bolt to the cinderblock wall in the basement. Speaking of which, winners, van drivers and masked thugs with burlap sacks should be cruising by your places of residence right about….. now.

Winners, contact me with your preferred email addresses for correspondence and your home addresses and shirt sizes for SCHWAG. Once I get back from Ireland and I see you haven’t burned the place down, I’ll send you some shit.

Congratulations!

Two total jerkwads pontificating about blogging.

I’m not really concerned about the long form. People who like it will write it, publish it and find it. Bookninja will be part of that. What I’m concerned about is that major mainstream institutions (read: big papers, magazines, etc.) that are trying desperately to develop online followings haven’t figured out that the audience online doesn’t read the same way as the audience for print does. So you get these magazines and newspapers writing longish articles for blog posts, and people don’t get past the first paragraph. No wonder. If they wanted to read the paper, they’d go to the paper, online or in print. If you want an audience to read you daily for your blog, you have to write for a blog-reading audience. Seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve even tried to hand-hold some big markets through doing it and they just can’t seem to get away from writing journalism. Guess what? This isn’t journalism.

Those automatic book recommendations made by Amazon and other e-tailers? FAIL. Once the robots of the world can chat me up to a good novel, I’m ready to be ruled by them. That or once they get mounted with solid state lasers and contact grenade launching gattling guns.

It would be wrong, however, to aim too poisoned an arrow at what is an entertaining application. A little digging reveals that Book Seer isn’t, as might have been expected, an affiliate marketing program for Amazon, but a harmless enough publicity-getting project launched earlier this month by a design and marketing company. Winningly, Book Seer also suggests you visit your local bookshop or library, and includes links to directories of both. It has posted some data relating to searches carried out so far here, which you can parse at your leisure. The dominance of Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling seems predictable enough at first glance, but less so when you consider Book Seer’s function: don’t most readers of Meyer and Rowling just read more Meyer and Rowling?

Well, I think democracy has finally reached its logical conclusion today. The flower of liberty has spread it crimson petals and thrust its mighty yellow stamen out into the recycled air of cyberspace, spraying the ejaculatory pollen of freedom over the hay-fevered face of oppression. The people have spoken in what is sure to be the most momentus election of our time. Something has happened that will capture the imagination of generations to come—like that guy from last fall, whasisface, who ended racism by being black and elected and then acted like an old white guy. The world has come a little closer to peace, people. Let freedom ring. I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord.

But first, a few impressions:

What an enormous lot of you there are, thanks for reading ‘lo these last six years, and for coming out of the closet to vote—I wish I could respond individually to each of your smart-assed remarks with the joy I felt reading them

It’s amazing how many different ways people can misspell “Kienapple”

There are a lot of sympathetic cat ladies and cat-lady-lovers out there

I think each candidate got at least one parent to vote for them (or the orphanage staff in the case of TUB), which speaks well of our efforts to keep the internet friendly for the the elderly and infirm

Those who already have a well-attended blog presence really know how to milk their readers for votes

It is also amazing how many of those voters can’t (be bothered to?) read instructions (but I counted their votes anyway, hanging chads be damned)

My brain’s numbers bone hurts

Votes accompanied by offers of sexual favours or monetary rewards were, in accordance with human rights policies around the (third) world, counted twice

More to come.

Do the crappy wages of the lit sector, from writing to editing to publishing, affect the quality of what reaches readers? I’d say that answer begins, like Hugh Hefner, with a big “depends”. Mostly I expect those who remain in publishing do so because they love it, not because they expect wealth and fame, so I don’t see how this holds. (From Galleycat)

Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature (You can insert “movies” for “literature,” if that’s the prism through which you want to read this.) It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.

Munro receives Booker Int’l

UK authors vs. Penguin in travel guide row… I’ve stopped caring, which is exactly what big corps want when imposing their will—but, hey, what’re you gonna do?

Turkish author acquitted

The dentists of our world want our children to remain illiterate!!!

Google vs Authors’ Guild… I’ve stopped caring, which is exactly what big corps want when imposing their will—but, hey, what’re you gonna do?

A language for the age

And one day later the vultures descend on Jackson’s corpse (and probably fly away with more nest material than meal, but I digress…)

Amazon vs. the American people… something about state taxes… I’ve stopped caring, which is exactly what…yadda yadda yadda

The Washington Post is holding a contest wherein readers can write parodies of the first paragraph of Cheney’s biography… Mine would read, “My earliest memory is of [redacted], and now I find myself [undisclosed].”

Do do do do, do do doo, do do do do DO! dododododo…. It’s killing you, isn’t it.

The human pieces of Michael Jackson are no more. Tomorrow’s Bookninja posts will be dedicated to his chimpanzees, Bubbles and Cory Feldman.

Wow, sometimes you realize, Holy shit, people actually read this thing. Hundreds and hundreds of votes, spread across all candidates (really, everyone is very close), but three people are, as of 10:15 NL time, EXACTLY TIED… for second place…. And the cat lady is 10 votes ahead of them all. Rally your troops, people. I cut off voting at midnight Eastern.

G

Updated and bumped AGAIN!

Last day to vote for your Bookninja guest bloggers. Read what’s below and join the madness. MADNESS I TELL YOU! And let me spell it out for you: p-l-e-a-s-e e-m-a-i-l m-e y-o-u-r t-o-p t-h-r-e-e p-i-c-k-s h-e-r-e.

Updated and bumped!

George, George, George… when will you ever fucking learn? Hee hee, you thought. I’ll put up a contest to get someone to do my work for me while I skip off, Scots-Irish free, to the Emerald Isle with nary a care. And now you have hundreds of votes to sift through. See, this is how karma works when the stakes are insignificant. Minor pleasures and minor annoyances. But I digress.

A cursory glance allows me to make this wholly unscientific assertion: it’s a close one, people. The forces of the cat lady rally, but are countered by twitter-enabled crowd of Madam No Apple. Then the sympathy vote ramps up for Johnnyboy only to be stomped down by the supporters of that Masked Menace TUB. But look out now, Elite Peet has made her considerable following aware she’s back in the market for asses to kick, and votes continue roll in waves for each. It’s very exciting in my inbox right now. I’d say you all love me, but I’m aware that you really just love them.

I’d say that each candidate right now has very close to the same number of votes. So, batten down your engines and start your hatches! This is going to be a hell of a race. Read the entries below and vote for your THREE top candidates BY SENDING ME AN EMAIL THROUGH THIS LINK! It’s much harder for me to collect results from the comments section, and given that the UN refused to supervise my vote count, you don’t want to piss me off or I’ll get all Ahmadinejad on your asses.

May the best ‘Ninjas win. (PS, God bless the three of you who included a “please don’t go, George” message with your votes. I know. I know. But we need this time apart in order to grow. I promise, things will work out. Shhhh. Don’t say any more. It’s not you, it’s me.)

Original post:

As previously promised, I herewith post several finalists for the position of Guest Blogger on Bookninja from July 2 to July 16. Five lucky winners will get to do my work while I’m away in Ireland, running Bookninja as they see fit: whether as a commie hippy love-in or with a dystopian iron fist. Who can tell what’s to come?

Your job now, dear Reader, is to pick your top three bloggers from this list. Send them to me at the linked address here. The top vote-getters will become the bloggers you read for the first two weeks of July and will be showered with adoration and tshirts (or, alternately, silence and thongs). This Friday I’ll announce the winners.

Lisa Peet

I would be an excellent guest blogger for Bookninja! Up until five days ago I was a regular blogger at Readerville, but now they’ve closed up shop and I’m just twisting in the cyberwind. I really enjoyed doing it, and have been thinking all week about ways to keep that momentum going — so your notice was a total Oh Snap moment. Aside from reasons that matter to ME, 1) I’m dependable, and will burn the midnight oil until I get a post up — I take my responsibilities seriously to a geeky degree; 2) I’m up to the minute on literary news, via a million RSS feeds and Twitter; 3) I’m an editor by trade, so I can turn a nice sentence and catch typos; 4) I have an interesting, fairly oddball sensibility, and like to find off-the-beaten-track connections within an item rather than just regurgitate the news of the day; 5) my voice is friendly and accessible and while it’s definitely my own, I do get the idea of keeping the general style of the blog consistent (I won’t swear unless you say I can, no pictures of my cats, etc.) — and I already read Bookninja, so that helps; 6) I’m super diplomatic and Work Well With Others; 7) I’m funny. My posts are all still up at Readerville, so those can speak for themselves.

Bronwyn Kienapple

Like you, I have a dark sense of humour (and perhaps a healthy bitterness) that contrasts nicely with my fervent love of all things book-related. I have been a dedicated Bookninja reader for the past year and am familiar with the format and flavour of your posts. I’m excited to work within that framework to let loose my own ninja skills (though my skills do not involve nun chucks or black costumes but would probably resemble Buffy the Vampire Slayer in action). I am a whore for trolling the internet for book-related news, especially blogs like Gadget Lab, Gizmodo, Bookslut, Maud Newton etc. I work within the book industry (that means I am continually exposed to what’s new and happening, though please be advised I have no ‘agenda’) and I run my own blog and wrote for the Varsity newspaper for four years, so I know how to string a sentence together. That said, I am a lover of the printed page, first and foremost. I promise to defend your blog with honour and snarkiness.

Robert Weirsema

Why should I be left in charge of the esteemed halls of Ninja Academy while you’re away? Dude, I totally got the place cleaned up, ushered the hookers out AND got your Faberge egg back from Guido the Killer Pimp the last time!

Oh… wait. I wasn’t supposed to mention that.

Um…. hmm… Valuable multiple perspectives (as writer, reviewer, bookseller), proven writing abilities, inherent bitchiness, and I thought the audition went well…

Heather

Why should you pick me? I’m a girl, I’m 31, I’m single, I write short stories, and I have cats…so it goes without saying that I read a lot. I like books. I like conch shells. I wear glasses, so it’s conceivable that we could start a small fire if all hell breaks loose while George is away and Bookninja guest bloggers form the last small enclave of civilization amidst the chaos raging all around us. I’m also a fan of the Oxford comma. If selected, I can promise sentences that are carefully, thoughtfully, and particularly crafted. It’s my sincere hope that guest blogging on Bookninja will open a new world of book-related debauchery that I’ll someday reminisce about in an interview…on Bookninja.

Plus the cats want me to write for Bookninja.

Gauthaman Ravindran

Dear Bookninja Editors:

The position of Bookninja Blogger, albeit temporary, is highly coveted. I understand that the zombified James Wood, lips still glistening with cerebrospinal fluid, has cast aside the skull of some luckless author to hunt and peck an application to join your black-clad critical assassins. From her Fortress of Inquietude in Wingham, Alice Munro has trimmed the nib of her fountain pen, ready to scribe her application onto a strip of parchment that will affixed to the leg of a red-eyed blackbird. Whereas my competitors can plead their cases with armies of laser-eyed limping robots, or the immense eye of a beached, sucking squid, I have no great qualifications, except that I love books, type tolerably well, and will deliver a cash bribe, via the Internet, provided cash can be transferred via the DVD drive of a recalcitrant lap-mounted difference engine.

Sincerely,
Gauthaman Ravindran

Jonathan Shipley

There comes a time in a man’s life when he says to himself, “I want to be a ninja.” Now is my time. The past year has been very trying for me, what with the divorce, the house being sold, the baby in my ex-wife’s belly that wasn’t my own, the move away from the place I loved, the laptop I ruined a week after buying it, and so on and so forth and it got me to thinking long, hard, and deep - I want to be a ninja. So, perhaps a different career path is in store for me in July if I’m a guest blogger for Bookninja.

Sarah Statz Cords

Hello:

I think I deserve to be chosen as a guest ‘Ninja during the month of July because I have to share my birthday with Thomas Friedman (July 20), and I feel that the universe owes me some small compensation for this indignity. The chance to post during the actual month of said indignity seems to indicate that fate wants you to choose me. Although, asking the universe to engage in this free trade, compensating me (handsomely; with t-shirt AND thong) here in the U.S. for a blog produced in Canada, makes me feel rather uneasily that perhaps I should re-evaluate the writings of Thomas Friedman.

But I’m not going to.

Thank you,
Sarah Statz Cords

Julia Evanczuk

Hello! My name is Julia. I’m a recent NYU grad, even more recently relocated to Vermont, and I’ve been writing all my life. I like to write stories about the weird and uncouth, such as voyeuristic monsters or girls who explode and put themselves back together again. I am not, admittedly, a published author…but that’s because I haven’t actually submitted any of my fiction for publication yet. I love to read, and my fascination with the book industry has mounted to a near-obsession. I would love to be one of your guest bloggers in July. Not only am I the wittiest banterer that ever bantered, but I also already have experience sifting through book news on the Net on a daily basis for my own blog, Lit Drift (www.litdrift.com). Aaaand! I am gainfully unemployed. Which, while this is more than a little unsettling for me, is good for YOU because this means I have all the time in the world to dedicate to Bookninja. I’m excited to write for a
blog I already visit regularly and enjoy–and I’m also excited for the skanky swag. I wear a size M thong, thank you.

Menachem Kaiser

Easy — I’m a full-blooded, toque-wearing Canadian who already does this all day on the New Yorker’s Book Bench. And you wouldn’t believe what we pass over sometimes…

I salute you, BookNinja.
Menachem Kaiser
The New Yorker

The Unknown Blogger

As your logical replacement, I plan to abuse my power as a tastemaker to advance an agenda of chaos and anti-establishment vitriol. Plus I will link to pictures and videos of kittens.

Do not deny me.

TUB

Men or women? I think we all know the answer to this: “sex”. That’s right, who gives a shit so long as we get some sex. Really, people, you’re kidding yourselves if you think there’s any other answer to any possible question. Sex. Done. Bookninja, of course, tackled this subject in depth just recently in The Magazine. Get your literary funk on and read it.

Women think that the Kama Sutra is an Indian takeaway. We are just not fluent in body language. Nor do we have the gift of the grab.

While men are ready, villain and able, a woman’s biggest fantasy in the bedroom involves discovering that her husband has picked his underpants up off the floor. On official Name/ Address/ Age forms, after it says Sex most women should write: Not if I can possibly help it.”

I know this because the new owner of the relaunched Erotic Review, Kate Copstick, is loath to allow too many female authors to slip between her covers.

In the press last weekend and on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with me this week she stated that women seldom write well about sex because females “have an agenda, they complicate sex, they make layers, it’s conditional. And they lie as well.”

Apparently, it would be like reading a meat-lover’s guide written by a vegetarian.

Sounds like the arts news cycle has come back around to its yearly obsession with naughty writers. Yesterday it was announced that Wired guru Anderson had lifted large portions of his book from Wikipedia and other sources, and he explains himself and apologizes (sort of) below, while today we find a self-published authors suing one of vacuous chair weights of daytime yack-filler The View for plagiarising her book on celiac disease. (Could this second story get any less sexy? Maybe we can take it to the level of horrifically gross and find an Ann Coulter connection…?)

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

Also note the VQR is not saying that all the highlighted text is plagiarism; much of is actually properly cited and quoted excerpts of old NYT times articles and other historical sources. And as you’ll see, in most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn’t go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors’ language remained (in a few cases I missed it entirely, such as that short Catholic church usury example, which was a total oversight). This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them.

So now we’ve fixed the digital editions before publication, and we’ll publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

News:

That’s it, I’m not coming back—the UK has a prestigious award for poetry pamphlets

No, seriously, fuck it… I’ll get an apartment and send for the wife and kids—poetry sales skyrocket

More on Safran Foer’s foeray (see what I did there?) into fine art—I think he’s just adorable and many times the artist the arts pages press makes him out to be

Carnegie Medal posthumously awarded

Daily Dose of Digital

Date a Penguin (think about it, they’re always dressed nice and in the winter you can ride them to work—you could do worse)

OUP to release bunch of dictionaries as iPhone apps—makes my nerd bits tingle

Audio book sales sliding

Granta launches digital short film project

Twitter creator surprised by software’s use in Iran

KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!!!!!!!!!

Guardian critic, Alison Flood—poor, lovely Alison Flood—seems set to dispair. Between half-wit Kanye West writing as a sort of retard’s Confucius and father-of-the-year Alec Baldwin being paid for parenting advice, who can blame her? Fear not, my dear Ms. Flood. We shall prevail. We shall do it in relative obscurity and with the indifference of humanity, but we shall prevail.

I’m not saying there isn’t always a slew of trash emerging from the publishing industry – a point ably highlighted by the then-Macmillan chief executive Richard Charkin in 2006, when the hardback bestseller list read 1) Jade: My Autobiography; 2) Jordan: A Whole New World; 3) Ugly by Constance Briscoe; 4) The Other Side of Nowhere by Daniella Westbrook; and 5) Is it Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? – but a host of recent signings and releases seem to be taking this to a new level.

Top 10 literary threesomes… browr. Bring it! Damn. The list is kind of dry, esp for a guy who wrote a book called “Ménage”.

4. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham

A touching and honest depiction of an enduring love triangle between a gay man, a self-proclaimed fag-hag and their at times bisexual lover, set in New York during the Aids epidemic. A book filled with love, pain and compassionate humour from the author of The Hours, it was also made into a film starring Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn.

I’ve noted here a few times how the books coverage at the CBC online has drifted away, which is sad. It’s mostly CP and AP wire stories now, with very little original coverage of literature. There was a time I though CBC online was the best Canadian arts coverage around. Now I remember to go there in the morning only as an afterthought. Looks like I’m not alone: THIS! magazine puts the boots to the Ceeb and makes the case for a full time literary czar who’s paid by the public coffer to think books.

Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.

As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)
…
Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.

News:

S&S continues great American tradition of paying Cheney to lie

Against all that good and holy, John Grisham films-barely-disguised-as-novels continue to get adapted to tv-shows-barely-disguised-as-films


Quite possibly the coolest thing ever to be known for: one guy creates writing for entire language

NEA hands out big dough for Big Read

CBA hands out Libris Awards, part-time ‘Ninja Boyden wins author of year and book of year

Attempts to ban a Sherman Alexie book in Chicago have failed

E-news:

Librarians capitalize on years of antisocial behaviour and squeezing things on to index cards by storming Twitter

Another press goes e-book, thereby leap-frogging itself from 1999 to 2001

Barnes and Noble appoints digi-czar

Book Depository looking at NA market, Amazon head office starts hearing that submarine ping sound

Wired editor’s new book possibly takes its own title, Free, too literally

CooooooOOOOooooooooolllllll……..

“Erotic-Horror Screenplay Discovered On Office Printer“. (see also)

“It was a very thick stack of paper, but I didn’t take it off the printer until about 40 other things had already come and gone,” said Lyon, who found the 116-page screenplay just after lunch. “At that point, it seemed to me like, if the author of Darkness Of Passion really didn’t want people reading it, he wouldn’t have left it sitting there.”

Added Lyon: “Knowing what I know now, I wish I’d just left well enough alone.”

Quotations mine. If I were on this panel in Frankfurt, I might object to the name… But I’m not. From Canada comes all-things-e champion Cory Doctorow, and Michael Tamblyn, who has recently succumbed to the dark side. Sounds interesting.

Andrew Savikas, v.p. of digital initiatives for O’Reilly Media, said: “Tools of Change for Publishing is helping shape the future of the publishing and media landscape, and bringing that message of change to the international audience attending Frankfurt is recognition that many of the opportunities for publishers are now truly global ones.” Thomas Minkus, press officer for the Frankfurt Book Fair, added: “Addressing the subject of digitisation and the new business models arising from it are key to the future success of our industry. Digitisation and the building of new business relationships are what draw people to Frankfurt.”

According to the organisers TOC Frankfurt will place the future of publishing into a meaningful context, offer practical advice about establishing new business models for paid content, and provide the networking opportunities to help publishers connect with like-minded participants from all over the world.

The IMPAC win gives Michael Thomas some breathing room. I’ll say. A busy schedule suddenly cleared by cash and fame.

short of being selected for Oprah’s book club, winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award may be the best thing that could happen to a new voice like Mr. Thomas. The prize is worth 100,000 euros, or about $138,000, and coincides with publication of “Man Gone Down” in Britain. The announcement immediately generated inquiries from foreign publishing houses.

“I kind of wrote that in a fit,” Mr. Thomas, 41, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hunter College, said of the novel. “I had a bunch of jobs. I was teaching four classes a semester and two or three in the summer, and working construction and coaching soccer and baseball and trying to build my house. I don’t think it is something I could replicate.”

They ain’t all dag-numb stoopid, I’ll tell you whut.

The place doesn’t have the Olympian readers it once did. When former MPPs Sean Conway or Bob Rae took to their feet, for instance, they often had a book at hand, their remarks informed by a lifetime’s reading and leavened by the perspective the pastime brings.

Which is not to say Queen’s Park is without flashes of erudition and the comforting sensibility of the bookworm.

New Democrat Peter Kormos, when asked to speak at funerals in his riding, frequently draws on the simple verities expressed by Preacher Casy in a similar role in The Grapes of Wrath.

Liberal backbencher Shafiq Qaadri can effortlessly cite passages from The Complete Yes Minister that offer perennial relevance to the political condition. His colleague Leeanna Pendergast, an English teacher who studied at Oxford, has the immortal briefings of Keats or Milton at her fingertips.

From the PC benches, Ted Chudleigh is fond of wordplay and frequently frames his appraisals of Premier Dalton McGuinty – as McGuinty’s late father liked to do during his own brief turn as an MPP – in doggerel and verse.

Yep. I can’t really provide more context than what’s above. Like evolution, ironically, censorship will find a way.

Officials are taking a second look at the list after a post appeared on the American Library Association’s GLBT listserve that said, “The DC (District of Columbia) Public Schools decided to scrub their summer reading list of all GLTB related books. This seems outrageous. We’re thinking that if a parent writes a strong letter, it’ll be the most effective. I’m thinking it should go to the mainstream press, and perhaps someone in the school system too.”

The post was originally made by Jeanne Lauber, a librarian at the DC Public Library on the Yahoo! discussion group “Lezbrian”. She goes on the say, “Apparently the public library system told the schools which books were GLTB (not knowing why they were being asked) and the schools removed them.”

Upon seeing the post, School Library Journal contacted both the DC Public Schools and the DC Public Library, and spokespeople at both said they had no knowledge of the situation. Since then, both institutions have ignored calls and emails from SLJ.

S&S finds out the hard way that text message marketing comes with strings attached. One board room’s clever marketing ploy is another board room’s actionable harassment.

A federal appellate court has reversed a lower court decision that had exonerated Simon & Schuster of breaking telecommunications law when it sent cellphone text messages to promote Stephen King’s novel “The Cell” three years ago.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled on Friday that the United States District Court for the Northern District of California had erred in ruling in Simon & Schuster’s favor in a class action suit brought by Laci Satterfield, a woman who objected to receiving an advertisement for “The Cell” in text message form.

The District Court had said that Simon & Schuster, whose Scribner imprint published “The Cell,” had not employed a so-called automatic telephone dialing system to send the messages, and that a text message was not a “call” as defined by federal law that prohibits automatic and unsolicited calls to cellphones. The District Court also ruled that Ms. Satterfield, in signing up for a ring tone service, had consented to receiving messages from “affiliates” of the ring tone provider.

“Pros”:

SF author gets £1m deal

College kids get book deal to Twitter great works of literature

Quebecor reorg going ahead

Cons:

Perseus lays off 20 and cuts titles for 2010

Inkwell goes under because HMH wouldn’t pay up

McNally Robinson leaving Calgary still has people upset

Surprise, surprise! The Kindle has some sticky DRM that will screw you on how and when you can read or download the books you “bought”. Amazon blames the publishers. Remember, kids, at the flip of a switch you could no longer “own” any of your files from Amazon or iTunes. All it takes is legal loophole, a desire f