He won the Ondaatje prize not the Canadian writer, though they are considering throwing Michael in for good measure next year — you know to spice things up a bit. James Meek is a former Moscow correspondent whose winning book, The People’s Act of Love is the first novel to win the award.

Set in Siberia in 1919, the novel concerns a renegade Czech army unit stranded in a community dominated by an obscure religious sect. Meek, a Guardian writer, drew on his experience as the paper’s foreign correspondent in Moscow in the 1990s. He has since reported from Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The People’s Act of Love, his third novel, was longlisted for the Booker prize.

Guenther Grass speaks out against American and British — uhm — issues.

In a speech to the annual International PEN meeting, the 78-year-old leftist author said Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were ‘like priests who have blessed the guns and carried death along with the Bible into distant lands.’

He charged that Washington had arbitrarily declared some dictatorships to be ‘rogue states’, saying this was part of a ‘fundamentalist structure of power.’

‘Politics does not get more stupid and more dangerous than this,’ said Grass, who charged that the United States was war-mongering, flouting the rules of the civilized world and encouraging terrorism.

And in comic book news, we get this. The church of the American superheroes. Pap.

In the fifth issue of “Infinite Crisis,” a recent comic-book miniseries from DC Comics, DC’s heroes meet in a church to gather their forces – and seek help from a higher power.

“We ask you, Lord, to take care of those who have already fallen,” says Zauriel, a fallen angel and a former member of the Justice League of America. “We ask you to watch over those that have been injured and those that are missing.”

And in Saudi news, or rather, NYT’s take on Saudi news:

Despite years of work aimed at changing Saudi Arabia’s public school curriculum, the country’s latest textbooks continue to promote intolerance of other religions, a new study said Tuesday.

A first-grade student is taught that “Every religion other than Islam is false”; the teacher instructed to “Give examples of false religions, like Judaism, Christianity, paganism, etc.” Fifth graders learn “It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and his prophet, or someone who fights the religion of Islam.”

My solution? We just keep driving around in our minivans with the in-car TV monitor tuned into Sponge Bob. Keep driving around until the gas runs out. Think how quiet the world will be.

You know, I was just thinking to myself, how’s that poor wee Oprah getting along? What that lady needs is a cash infusion. Imagine what she could do if she could just get ahead. You know, this just goes to show you, the world has a way of being so very very fair.

Here I thought it was something to do with ME being immune to change. Turns out the medium is the message or some other smart-sounding thing if that’s totally inappropriate.

I was a philosophy major in college, and one of my most memorable debates with a classmate had to do with the relationship between information and the form in which it is presented. He argued, rather absurdly I thought, that a computerised version of a book bore no relationship whatsoever to the original book itself. To him, the form was entirely integral to the essence of the thing, and to change its form was to create something entirely different.

After many years observing the evolution of various media, I’ve come to agree with this point, or at least a key part of it. Different types of media function differently, and even if the content is similar the form matters quite a lot.

I really think it’s a mistake to write this article with just the word “books” standing in for every volume of information. So much of this has to do with the TYPE of book being discussed. As I think I’ve crapped-on about before, if you can get my Chilton’s manual, thesaurus, OED, Britannica, and SAS survival guides into one searchable device I can carry in my bag, all the more power to you. But when it comes to the latest Ishiguro novel, there is definitely some connection between the object and the ideas. There’s a silver thread of thought between the forehead and the words, but there’s also ones from the finger tips to the pages, from the lap to the jacket, from the eyes to the typeface and ink. Undoubtedly my grandchildren will call me a romantic. Hell, you might even. But dagnabbit, that’s the way we had our books and we liked it!

So whatever happened to that dude, anyway? My theory is that he’s immortal and is now living his life in Toronto as my friend Chris. But there’s a whole backstory to that that you’d just need to have been drunk in the Joyce on Bloor ten years ago to understand.

Here are some interesting politics-related lit stories:

• Can Bill Maher keep his yap shut for some Amazon hoochie coo?
• Conservative books in a liberal market (I would have read further if the headline were, conservative books in a liberal meatgrinder)
• Al Gore interviewed (not really lit-related, but more important than things lit-related)
• Slushpile finds out the hard way that publicists will bust a cap in yo ass if you fuck with their author (they’ll then cover it up with a story about quail or something)

A corpulent, vanilla-scented CEO leans back into her yoga mat-covered throne of skulls, wipes the blood of the independents from her maw and flicks away the last remaining corpse of a small publisher. “My work here is done,” she says, picking her teeth with a tattered literary fiction title, her voice simultaneously rumbling and shrieking with the screams of a thousand damned midlist authors. She heaves her sated bulk from the chair, and spreading her leathery wings, opens a crack in the earth and disappears.

The world is going gaga for cuddly old Henrik Ibsen, dead 100 years now (and not 100 years too soon, if you believe, as I do, that some Mayan calendars predict the end of the world by Victorian hyper-realist emotional minutia overdose).

Well, duh. But that doesn’t answer whether it was good enough to be number one. Some people on the street comment as well. (First link from Maud)

Wow. Intellectualising computer games. No doubt the Phds are already on the way.

“Every project draws on different inspirations — half the fun of making a game is the research that goes into building the foundation and framework of your story,” she explained. “In the Soul Reaver series, I focused on a handful of core ideas — but the main theme revolved around the question of free will in a universe apparently ruled by fate. I saw both Kain and Raziel as Oedipus figures (Sophoclean, not Freudian), being railroaded by fate and all the while fighting for their free will. They are heroes because they refuse to submit, even when all the odds are stacked against them.
“Raziel’s story is also based on ideas in Gnosticism — the core idea being that the material world is an illusion, a lie perpetrated by a false and malignant god whose aim is to keep the human soul in darkness and ignorance. In this world system, the hero’s goal is knowledge, enlightenment, and the exposure of the truth.

I’ll be hiding this article from the kiddies; all I need is another compelling argument from my smartypants offspring. “Mother, you’re stunting my brain growth. How will I be able to keep up with the other kids in school if my mytho-fantasy gaming background is hampered by your anti-intellectualism?”

The Onion had a couple good stories I missed while in St. John’s (we bought a house!). The first concerns novelists and their tendency to shrug things off. The second is the poignant tale of David Foster Wallace’s struggle with illiteracy. (Second link from Bookslut)

Oprah Winfrey’s writing a book about weight loss. And gain. And loss.

Oprah Winfrey, a self-confessed compulsive eater, has signed the biggest non-fiction book deal in history to write about her battle with the bulge.

Miss Winfrey, 52, the host of the highest-rated chat show in the world, is to be paid an undisclosed amount by Simon & Schuster. The publishers would reveal only that her deal would beat the record £6.4 million paid to Bill Clinton for his 2004 memoir, My Life.

Eat. Purge. Eat. Purge. Oprah should have herself on her talk show and tell herself that it’s okay, girl, just calm down. A very skinny black friend of mine has expressed to me that she wants to go on Oprah and tell her to stop going on about fat this, skinny that. The gist was, “Skinny got issues too and don’t get me wrong, I love my Oprah.”

David Letterman takes on turncoat sellout Mary Cheney. Sweeeeet. It almost makes me want to watch Letterman. Almost. That slimy, high-speed burrowing grub of a Canadian band leader Paul Shafer still sends me away every time, shiver-dancing with the willies. Watching that man metabolise is like watching a tiger centipede kill and devour a living mouse (really, don’t click on this last link if you’re even remotely afraid of creepy-crawlies.) It’s horrific to know nature allows such activity. (First link from Maud)

Novelist, dead at 77.

More on lad lit in the Chronicle. I meet this article with a resounding MEH.

Virtually every writer of guy lit is an almost-thirtysomething graduate of an elite college or university. Their college pedigrees read like the college rankings at a certain national magazine: Brown (Sam Lipsyte), Harvard (Benjamin Kunkel), Stanford (Erik Barmack), Wesleyan (Scott Mebus), Yale (Kyle Smith). Each writer, and their characters, lives in New York City. Each work is written in the first person, by a destabilized, unreliable narrator; these books are like one long run-on sentence of self-justification and rationalization. “I don’t want your wholesome values, your reasonably good judgment,” says Jeb Braun, protagonist in Erik Barmack’s The Virgin. “My goal isn’t to please you. So if you’re expecting the whole handshake and nod routine, you can stop reading right now.” (Several authors refer to “the book you hold in your hand,” as if to distance themselves even further from their own sad story.)

I don’t know about Lipsyte in with these. His book was pretty damn good. (From Backwards City)

The fringe is where all the good tassels hang out. You know, like on a Village Person’s jacket? The fringe at the Hay festival. Man, it’s like so groovy. Like Dead Poets’ Society, with saxophones and waving arms and such, but not including that bummer of a suicide. What a downer that Robert Sean Leonard is.

Very interesting story about whatever residual electricity is left in poetry in an age where everything else is electronic.

When Madge McKeithen, whose 23-year-old son, Isaac Levy, suffers from an undiagnosed debilitating illness, realized that it was affecting his mind as well as his body, she began to read poetry. “Ravenously, every day, online,” she said, in her apartment on the Upper West Side. “It was grasping, desperate, questioning reading.”

Now she has published a book, “Blue Peninsula” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), about her reading, and her son. “Blue Peninsula” is unlike almost any other book about poetry. Above all, it is not a self-help book. It is rigorous, unsentimental, tough, dry, the words like bullets coming at you. And it offers no easy hope.

I’m working on an essay about poetry and tragedy right now, so I find this utterly fascinating and illustrative, in a slanted way, of something I’m trying to get at.

In an environment so conduscive to massive abuse of authority, even the couldn’t-get-a-real-job rent-a-cops think they have the right to get all big brother on the average joe. A grad student at the University of Florida has been getting bullied by campus police who have been trying to get him to submit DNA samples and fingerprints so they can match him against unsolved crimes. The reason? He wrote a horror story on his blog. Oh, beautiful, rapacious skies…

That’s what you got to get the sales going before they haul your mid-list tuckus all the way back to your publisher’s basement.

These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume. In a market dominated by the big chain stores, if a novel doesn’t sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim.
…
It’s a delicate dance: buyers use a writer’s past sales to determine how many copies of a new novel to order; publishers try to convince buyers that a book has potential even if they can’t justify spending the money to promote it the way they would a commercial title. Publishers frequently argue for the bottom quarter of their list — the books that get the least marketing support and often sell the fewest copies. That’s “where the major writers of the future usually start,” Galassi said. “It’s where much of the best writing is, the work of the odd, uncooperative, intractable, pigheaded authors who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The ’system’ can only recognize what it’s already cycled through. What’s truly new is usually indigestible at first.”

For poetry, the situation is somewhat different. If your title doesn’t sell well in the first two weeks, the three copies on the shelf are reduced to one that sits there for years gathering dust until one of your students who’s planning on being late with a portfolio submission comes along and buys it in an effort to butter you up before asking for an extension.

Book design is getting all haute couture on your button-down ass.

Italian Joy had the same effect on the judges of the 2006 Book Design Awards, who yesterday announced Cull as winner for best-designed illustrated book and – for a second year – best-designed book of the year.

“Her design really captures the exuberance of the subject,” says one of the judges, Jill Brown, the publisher of illustrated non-fiction at Random House. “The first time I saw the book in a bookshop, I gasped.”

Dudes, I would have gasped too. I’m no designer, so take this with a grain of salt and a pound of aspirin, but if someone handed me a cover like this for one of my books, I’d send it back with the LATEST version of MSPaint. Maybe it’s not translating well to the reduced resolution of the common jpeg, but I think this cover looks like, to use a technical term reserved for professional designers, ass. But WTF do I know.

Some reports from last week’s BEA convention. Jessa met Cohen. And John Updike gets persnickety.

When John Updike approached the lectern in the Convention Center ballroom Saturday morning, most of his bleary-eyed, coffee-swilling audience expected him to talk about his latest novel, “Terrorist.” But Updike, the much-honored 74-year-old author of dozens of volumes of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism, said that would be “immodest.” Instead, he praised the assembled booksellers as “the salt of the book world” and reminisced for a while about bookstores he had loved in his youth.

Then, without warning, he opened fire on the technorati.

This is worth it mainly for the first segment. Very very funny. JK Rowling, trawling through a dumpster in her pre-Harry days meets a dick from the future.

Billy Collins, in all his populist glory, examined at the CPR.

Collins’s most endearing trait, the one that is most frequently trumpeted by his legions of supporters, is that his poems are, above all, accessible. This is true. They waft over the reader as easily as poems can, and this produces a pleasant sensation, particularly for an initiate of modern poetry who, more likely than not, is actively repelled from the art by its practitioners and their protective devotees. When Collins reads his poems, they become a kind of first-rate entertainment. Collins has traded on his reputation as an available, easily comprehended poet for most of his career, and earns credit for reaching such a formidably large audience. However, unlike other popular poets, such as Maya Angelou, Collins (along with fellow bestseller Mary Oliver) is marketed as if he were among the most critically revered poets of the age.

Note to CPR: Um, Robert Service, “the Canadian Kipling”, was a popular American poet? Ahem? I repeat, a-HEM?

Line up!

The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced today it has received an extraordinary $1.87 million gift from the estate of George and Ingeborg Woodcock. These funds will enable the Writers’ Trust’s Woodcock Fund to provide more than $100,000 annually to Canadian writers facing financial crises. Most of the monies available to Canadian writers are in the form of literary prizes; the Woodcock Fund is unique in that it offers help to struggling and established authors alike.

For more information, check the press release, here. (Thanks, J)

If I may quote my friend JB, “It turns out Peter Carey is a bit of a dick.” Alison Summers, too, by my estimation, but perhaps she has just cause; divorce is ugly and often uglier for the wife. As we’ve posted before, Carey stands accused of recreating his divorce in his latest book and guess who is the antagonist?

“People say writers have been doing this forever?” she says. “Then they need to be exposed and held accountable. No one here believes novelists lie, even when they boast of it. They’re regarded as modern-day priests and priestesses.

“I don’t care if my name is temporarily associated in strangers’ minds with the Alimony Whore. It’s the people who know me – from my schoolteachers to my great-aunts and uncles to friends all over the world – that I want to assure that I have not changed, that I have not become corrupted into this nasty stereotype of a gold-digging, shoe-obsessed bimbo.

“I haven’t spoken out for the entire three years he was waging a public relations war on me, and making life miserable on the home front. That also had catastrophic effects on all three of us. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Summers accuses Carey here of hiding earnings and of, it seems, an almost pathological narcissism.

Carey’s only response to Summers has been through a speech at his Sydney book launch in April. In a rambling story he attacked the Herald for turning his “masterwork” into “dog shit”.

His masterwork? Are you even allowed to decide that yourself?

The Orthodoxy (all five hundred of them) protested opening night of The Da Vinci Code and not on artistic grounds, which might have been more sensible, it appears.

Protesters carried banners saying: “Sons and daughters of the Orthodox Church, turn against western ways. The Orthodox Church is the mother of our nation.” They urged filmgoers not to attend the Moldovan premiere of the film last night at the Patria theater in downtown Chisinau.

The film “made fun of Christ’s church,” said Vadim Cheibas, an Orthodox priest. He objected to portrayal of Jesus as “a simple man with vices and human passions, and descendants – which contravenes the doctrine of the Orthodox Church.”

I guess he’ll have a lot more time to write a lot more potboilers. Ouch.

Saddam Hussein’s fourth novel, which was reportedly completed on the eve of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, has been published in Japan.

The manuscript of Devil’s Dance, which tells the story of an heroic Arab tribesman who defeats a Judaeo-Christian plot to take over his town, was smuggled out of Iraq by his eldest daughter, Raghad.

Someone should write a book aboout the daughter of the tyrant who smuggles (I like this turn of phrase here) her father’s polemic romance out of a war zone. The Nobility! The Great Cause! The Humour!

This caught my eye since I’ve just begun reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to my boys. They love the vernacular but are a little afeared of all Jim’s superstitions. Otherwise, the story is alive and well; the humour is just so and the adventure hasn’t lost a bit of edge; “Read another chapter! Read another chapter!” Here is Twain in Hawaii:

Determined to “ransack the islands” for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater’s edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.

You heard right, Huck: America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.

“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.

He also tried swimming with nude native women, but when he got into the surf, they got out.

It’s just Huck Finn.

Here’s an idea.

Arts Council England is to launch talks between publishers and black and Asian poets to try to get more of them published. The move comes after research indicated that 8% get work into print despite their popularity at poetry readings.

A report commissioned by the council and the writers’ group Spread the Word disclosed that poetry presses failed to enter a black or Asian writer for the Next Generation Poets list in 2004. Paul Keegan, Faber poetry editor, said: “Poetry is an inherently conservative genre. It tends to open up relatively slowly and has not diversified as freely as fiction.”

Want to share in the glory of writing a novel? To busy to actually write one yourself? There is hope.

A first-time author has bypassed the traditional route of getting an agent, and is publishing a collaborative thriller on eBay. The novel is being written one page at a time, one writer to a page. As each installment is finished, the chance to create the next is offered for auction on eBay. So far, 17 pages have been completed, with 234 to go, and while the quality of the writing might charitably be described as variable, there is no shortage of plot.

Novel Twists is the brainchild of 31-year-old Phil McArthur, who got the idea while recovering from cancer. “I’d had extensive chemotherapy and I had a lot of time on my hands to recover,” he says. “I found I was reading a lot more, and that inspired me to think maybe I could write something myself.”

The best part of this project is the bio note at the bottom of each page, like this one by Dominic Colella: “Creativity has been building up inside me for years. Words, music, art, ideas.” Lovely.

James Lasdun has beat out Tremain, Faber and Trevor and Dasgupta to win the inaugural short story competition and £15,000.

The National Short Story contest, which offers the world’s richest purse for the form and is aimed at reviving interest in the genre, was labelled “unashamedly elitist” after it called for submissions from published writers rather than seeking out new talent. Nonetheless, it drew over 1,400 entries, a much larger number than the organisers had expected.

Was it entirely by invitation only? Anyone?

We always knew they’d fall in each other’s arms eventually. Iran is honouring Georgia poet, Coleman Barks for his brilliant translations of Rumi.

Sitting beneath pictures of the founding father of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Barks said: “I love this country. I love this country. It feels like home.”

The difference between Barks’ view and that of the U.S. government, which brands Iran a major sponsor of terrorism, was not lost on the audience, which gave Barks several standing ovations.

“This is a good omen at a black time, when history is drawing an untrue picture of Iran,” literature professor Ali Mohammad Haghshenas said during the ceremony.

Haghshenas added Barks “should be considered at home in Iran because of his work.”

Who said irony was dead?

For $5 million anyone can remember another book’s worth of material.

The new book will cover the work of the Clinton Foundation, the nonprofit group that the president set up to work on issues including AIDS, poverty, women’s issues and religious and racial reconciliation, Mr. Barnett said.

Mr. Clinton will also write about people he has met in the course of his post-presidency, a group which will likely include both well-known figures like former President George H.W. Bush, as well as people working in public service. Mr. Clinton worked with Mr. Bush on recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the tsunamis that lashed Southeast Asia.

If you stand really close to a good cause, do you become a good cause?

Another one jumps on the Dan Brown gravy train:

Whatever you think of Dan Brown’s mega-best seller, one thing is clear: The concepts and arcana in “The Da Vinci Code” are not simply the product of his own fevered imagination. He drew from many sources — including one unorthodox writer in our own back yard. Margaret Starbird, 63, of Steilacoom has written six books about the Catholic Church’s alleged suppression of the “divine feminine” — a controversy at the heart of “The Da Vinci Code.”

And Margaret Starbird on the power of prayer:

Did you come to this position through prayer or by digging through early documents?

In the beginning it was prayer, and then (after reading) “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” I started looking at research materials. And of course there are many out there.

My research shows that as a result of the Inquisition in 13th-century Europe, it all went underground and showed up in art and artifact, and that painters and other artists hid this great secret in their works, hoping that someday it would be time for it.

In my experience, prayer always leads to research and, naturally, back again to prayer. Hallelujah and God Bless!

And they don’t mean their authors’s ideas. Ba-dum.

Random House, the publishing company owned by Bertelsmann, the German media giant, announced on Tuesday that it would increase the proportion of recycled paper it buys for its books to at least 30 percent by 2010, from 3 percent now.

The company currently buys 110,000 tons of uncoated paper to publish books each year. When it reaches its target of purchasing 33,000 tons of recycled-content paper by 2010, it believes that will be equivalent to saving more than 550,000 trees a year and removing 8,000 cars from the nation’s roads, because of the resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

While they’re at this, why not build a big composter for all the read and discarded copies of Da Vinci; surely the reading public can each give up at least one of their copies. Think of all the roses we could fertilise.

Baigent isn’t in the least pissed off. He’s quite happy cashing in his savings to pay his formidable legal bill. Saving the world from copyright infringement — all in a day’s work.

“Because we had to. It seemed such an open-and-shut case, we had to. We never intended to go to court; we thought we would just point out what seemed so obvious, get a proper acknowledgment of our work, and that would be that. But we couldn’t even get them to talk to us, so in the end we had to. We worked out that we could afford it, just, so we had to.”

He had expected that other writers and journalists would see the case was about authors’ rights to their own work, and offer their support: the deafening silence surprised and saddened him. “We weren’t just trying to get a bit of Dan Brown’s money, and we were certainly not doing it for the publicity. I find that the most astounding suggestion. I’ve calculated that I’d have to sell an extra nine million copies of the Holy Blood to pay the legal bill – that’s very expensive publicity indeed. But what have writers got except the intellectual copyright in their work? We’ve done very well – not as well as Dan Brown, but very well – so we could afford to stand up to one of the biggest publishers in the world, and so we had to. I believe that the protection for all writers has been seriously weakened, in Britain at least, by this judgment. If we had to do it all again, we would make the same decision.

Hindsight is 20/20. Uh-huh.

I am sorry I have never heard of this writer as I would like to know someone named Birk Sproxton; this may be the best name ever and I am humbly more jealous of this name than of the prize this name has won. Please welcome, Birk Sproxton!

Alberta author Birk Sproxton has won the $25,000 MacEwan Author’s Award for his memoir and short fiction collection Phantom Lake: North of 54.

The award, named for Grant MacEwan, a former lieutenant-governor of Alberta, is the province’s largest literary award.

Sproxton, based in Red Deer, was among the winners of 16 awards for writing and publishing who were honoured Saturday at the Alberta Book Awards gala.

Phantom Lake: North of 54 is a collection of stories and legends about Sproxton’s hometown of Flin Flon, Man., and celebrates life on the Canadian Shield. It was published by University of Alberta Press.

Birk, if you are ever in town, look us up; we want to take you out and introduce you around just so we can roll your lovely name around our mouth.

What are we putting in the cornflakes?

A 9-year-old whiz kid who memorizes World Almanacs and whose intellect doesn’t register on standard IQ tests is now a published author.

Thomas Little’s first book is “The Adventures of the Symbols,” a self-published novel that has keyboard characters such as $ and % in a mysterious plot. The book was ranked No. 557,363 in sales Tuesday on Amazon.com.

Well, at least my ranking is higher. Phew. Oh, wait; his ranking is plummetting. Why can’t these parents get their shit together and hire their kid a PR person. Get with the program, people. Your little boy needs packaging, obviously. It isn’t enough it be so fucking smart you have to homeschool, you need a slant, an angle; you need Oprah, you need, duh, exposure. First, put the kid in school. I don’t care if he’s too clever for the likes of them masses, at least there are masses (think demographic, think sales!). Pump it up. So you got a smarty pants kid; get him touring, for chrissake.

David Bodanis, the winner of this year’s Aventis Science Book Award, has pledged the winning amount, in total, to the family of David Kelly.

“Science is all about truth. There’s one realm where a lot of people feel that truth hasn’t come out and truth is known but it hasn’t been acknowledged,” he told the Guardian. Alluding to Dr Kelly’s death following comments he made to a journalist about Iraq war intelligence Dr Bodanis said, “[Dr Kelly] was aware of what was really going on and the government lied and tried to feel they could suppress the truth. Events have clearly shown that they were wrong and he was right.”

Dr Bodanis’ book, “Electric Universe – How Electricity Switched on the Modern World” beat off competition from Collapse, a rare scientific take on the history of fallen societies, by Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer prize winner and evolutionary biologist, as well as Vivienne Parry’s book The Truth About Hormones, and Parallel Worlds, by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist. Electric Universe had been rated second favourite by the bookies.

The rising dollar is allowing (or forcing, depending on your mood) publishers to lower the cover price of books, which is good because the high dollar’ll also drive the film industry into the ground, which will mean my family’s penury, so at least I’ll still be able to afford a book or two, allowing me to escape into some other world for a while.

“Book prices are going down. I can say that for sure,” said Kevin Hanson, president of Simon & Schuster Canada, one of the country’s largest book publishers.
“As the Canadian dollar has appreciated against the U.S. dollar, you’re seeing a dramatic effect on prices of books and I think that’s a really good thing.”

Retailers have been conveying angry complaints from customers who cringe when they examine the suggested list price and see a difference between U.S. and Canadian prices that far exceeds the exchange rate.

This’ll likely be difficult for some publishers/writers whose books have recently been published with ridiculously high cover prices. I suggest a cash back or maybe an intitiative like Canadian Tire uses: say Knopf bucks toward Knopf books. The last Knopf hardcover FICTION I bought was $35.00 which made even me, a hardcore book buying obsessive, gape and scratch my head. I’m thinking, too, that a lower cover price means lower profit for the agent and writer on royalties: math heads, throw us a calculus for the optimum profit agasint the cheapest cover price. We need more math on this site anyway.

I preposted this to remind you Toronto Ninjas to check out the One Little Goat Theatre Company’s double-header live production of two radio plays by Yehuda Amichai at the Miles Nadal JCC at Bloor and Spadina tonight. Includes the world premier of Killing Him, translated by OLG’s artistic director (and poet) Adam Seelig. It’s one night only and it’s quite a great cast, director, and venue. Plus you’ll be supporting a great new theatre company with a mandate to explore the intersections between theatre and poetry.

Okay, kiddies. I’m away Wednesday to Saturday, looking for a house in St. John’s. Kathryn will have sole executive power in my absence, including full discretion on corporal AND capital punishment. Tread lightly, as she’s been in a mood (I once saw her perform an unrequested vasectomy at twenty paces…. she did it all with a stern look).

Remember to check out the Magazine while I’m gone, including Kevin Chong’s Mr. Wordwise, Adam Sol and Christine Fischer Guy reviewing Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Timothy Taylor interviewing John Degen, and the first chapter Lee Gowan’s novel-in-progress, Confession. Also, look forward to more articles in the coming weeks, including Aislinn Hunter and Sean Horlor discussing Urban vs. Rural poetry and Dani Couture and Matthew Fox reviewing the Romentics line of romance novels for gay men (my early condolences to the good people at Romentics). Be sure to check out the wicked illustrations accompanying some of the articles — the work of our in-house illustrator Charles Checketts, who joins the Bookninja payroll, such as it is, this spring.

Particularly if they can’t read. The options for Canadian kids are endless. Wait, is “options” too big a word? What about “Canadian”?

Then there are the so-called teen high-low books for those with a lower vocabulary level.

“They are carefully plotted, they’ve got good characters but they are written at a vocabulary level that is better designed for the reluctant reader,” Halliday said.

“We know that there are teens who are not reading at their grade level but they want to read books that are not as long but are well written and address their concerns.

“To read a book that is less difficult you don’t necessarily want to read a book that talks down to you or is childish.”

Um, isn’t “vocabulary” the kind of word you’re trying to avoid here? Maybe you should say, “a lower gooder word level”. You don’t want to make the kiddies feel stupid.

The slim books with attractive covers have a similar look and provide a sense that they’re part of a series, Halliday said.

Ah, the allure of crazygonuts awesome cover art. How many crappy fantasy novels did I buy because there was a sword stuck in a stone. Wait, just one — The Sword of Shabooboo or something. But still. I want those years back. I have plans for them now that I know better. (Thanks, K)

Things have been quiet on the LongPen because tests have shown it doesn’t work on people.

And this is where Atwood’s creation failed.

It doesn’t work on body parts.

Maybe, eventually, it will sign all the flat pages you want. But it won’t sign a breast.

Atwood and her team realized this flaw too late, according to corporate sources.

The usual excited screams of autograph seekers became terrifyingly different sorts of screams when tests resulted in a series of extremely severe puncture wounds. Those people got off easy. One individual — it happened while the stylus was executing the author’s trademark flourish with the “w” in “Atwood” — saw his kidney bayonetted out. Another, even more dismayed, wound up, not to put too fine a point on it, singing soprano.

That sounds to me like it works on people just fine….

In which the entire staff of the British library system joins hands with Salman Rushdie, JK Rowlings and a band of roving Yorkshire dyslexics and sings round upon round of that Beatles song (you know the one) and after that begins the winding dervish dance of love and affection for all borrowable and heavily laminated bar-coded print material, followed by a mini-opera puppet show about being nice and not using your new crayons on the…stop that, child, or I’ll have to pay for the damn thing.

The Love Libraries campaign published details today of all the authors and celebrities who have agreed to support the initiative by appearing in libraries or speaking about the contribution libraries make to public life.

Rowling compared libraries to the World-Between-The-Worlds from CS Lewis’s Narnia books, “where visitors could enter a thousand different worlds by jumping into different pools”. “When I got my eldest daughter a library card I felt as though I had bought her citizenship of that same fabulous world,” she said.

All you need is love, love.

Washington, D.C. is losing librarians in the schools to computer lab coordinators.

This is a school system in which — according to its just-released Master Education Plan — most kindergartners have “no exposure to books at home.” Average reading scores on a national standardized test (according to a recent letter from a U.S. deputy secretary of education to Superintendent Clifford Janey) “were lower than every other participating city school district.”

The result of this abysmal record is that a third of the city’s high school students drop out without graduating. An equal percentage of District adults read at or below the third-grade level.

Schools, of course, were not invented to make anyone particularly smart, only civilised, and they clearly aren’t going to achieve this with more machines in the classroom.

Punjab University is trying to stop the Islami Jamiat Talaba from running a three day bookfair. The IJT is an Islamist student organisation.

However, demonstrating some ‘flexibility’, the varsity agreed to start its own book fair on May 17 night to ‘honour’ the IJT schedule, PU sources told Daily Times. Sources said the IJT had agreed upon this schedule and its representatives might also be included in the book-fair coordination. They said, however, that a number of deans of the university had been trying their level best to have IJT hold its book fair from May 16 to 18. Sources said that after this ‘flexibility’ on both sides the PU has also postponed its decision to expel about a dozen other students who are IJT activists.

For a Western take on Punjab University and its relationship to IJT, look here.

Some people go to the corporations to write their books, some to sell them. If you ask me (you didn’t but I have an opinion, okay?), this looks more like a pitch than a book reading.

A growing roster of corporations, including Microsoft, Boeing, Google and Altria, the owner of brands like Philip Morris and Kraft Foods, have played host to writers in their offices. Even the United States Treasury Department has invited nearly 40 authors to speak over the last two years. Executives see the author readings as akin to other perks like in-house gyms, subsidized cafeterias and financial advice.

The idea is to reach people who rarely buy books and might otherwise never attend a reading. “I scarcely ever go to bookstores,” said Carolyn Fletcher, an accountant in the Starbucks tax department, after she had her copy of “Madonnas” signed by Ms. Dean. Ms. Fletcher said she had been to at least 10 such events at Starbucks and bought books at most of them. “I don’t think I had ever heard an author speak prior to coming to one of these.”

Now she’ll have to invite a representative from IKEA in so that she can facilitate a bookshelf buying; it’s just so difficult to get out what with all this work. I want to read sometime to the Philip Morris and Kraft Foods people but only if we can do a buffet — I’m thinking baby marshmallows in Jell-o, a little erotica, and a ciggie afterwards.

More on Kunitz at the NYT, Washington Post, BBC,

An open letter. Everyone should run out and buy Steve Almond’s books right now.

DEAR Father Leahy,

I am writing to resign my post as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College.

I am doing so — after five years at BC, and with tremendous regret — as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.

Many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing that Rice’s actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.

But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental. Simply put, Rice is a liar.