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| Hearsay: |
A long time in the works, we finally present a return in The Magazine to our famous “inverse omnibus review”, in which we do the exact opposite of what the big papers often to do (that is, ask a single reviewer to review three or four books), by gathering several critics to discuss a single book.
Here we have New York Times poetry critic David Orr, Washington Post book critic and Publishers Weekly editor Marcela Valdes, and Globe and Mail critic and Books in Canada editor Carmine Starnino discussing The Savage Detectives, by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. This sprawling, magnificent story is finally available in English (tr. Natasha Wimmer), and it’s definitely a must-read text.
Combining a diaristic form with documentary interviews, The Savage Detectives elevates the traditional artist’s coming-of-age story to a place of high pathos, low erotica, extreme comedy, and high genre all the while anticipating the current, neurotic yearning for memoir, for what’s ‘true’.
Hope you enjoy!
A wronged author lets loose on the literary world about what she saw as the critical kneecapping of her book based on the social ideals of the critics:
These days I have a better understanding of the intolerance to which, for a while, I fell victim. I see that, like all intolerance, it arose from dependence on an ideal. I see that cruelty and rudeness and viciousness are its harbingers, as they have always been. I see that many – most – of my female detractors continue to write routinely in the press about motherhood and issues relating to children. Their interest in these issues has a fixated quality, compared with their worldly male equivalents. I am struck by this distinction, for it is clear that they hunger to express themselves not as women, not as commentators or intellectuals, but as mothers. This hunger evidently goes unsatisfied, and must content itself with scraps from the table of daily news.
A response piece by a critic tries to clarify:
It was not a word that she used, but it was clear that she felt something like persecution and, catching the tone of many of the pieces she quoted, it was plain enough to see why.
The word she did use, however, was intolerance; an intolerance, she decided, that “arose from dependence on an ideal”, in this case an ideal of motherhood. But the mention of intolerance seems to take literary criticism into another arena, one in which the critics’ expression of their point of view, however trenchantly expressed, becomes confused with their view of the writer’s right to write what she has written.
To take strenuous issue with a piece of work seems an entirely different matter from feeling that it shouldn’t have come into being at all; and it seems unlikely that even Cusk’s harshest critics were suggesting that.
Well, that’s a little misleading. In something of a MPD murder/suicide, a poet who wrote a novel found herself unable to ever write poems again. The narrative urge killed the image. How terrifying. It’s like a literary horror movie.
WHEN the poet Rhyll McMaster began her first novel, she found she could no longer write a poem. “It all just went away, just disappeared,” says the award-winning poet with eight volumes of poetry to her name.
“I used to walk around with poems forming in my head all the time. Everything I saw I would translate into a poem. But then it just stopped. I found that attempting the novel changed the way I saw things. I had to stop seeing the world as a poem, but as a narrative. I am a camera now; I see the world as if it were an unfolding film telling a story.”
Mind you, there are probably a few of you out there who are remembering some poets you’ve seen make the switch but continue to publish poetry on the side, and you’re thinking, At least this one had the sense to admit it was over.
Margaret Atwood celebrates the anne-iversary (har) with a longish essay outlining the scope and history of the phenomenon that is arguably one of the most defining books of Canada, so far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, a year before my mother was born, so when I first grinned and snivelled my way through it at the age of eight, it was a youthful 40. I revisited it through the eyes of my own child in the 1980s, when it was approaching 80. Then our family actually went to Prince Edward Island, and stayed in Charlottetown, and saw the sprightly, upbeat Anne of Green Gables musical that’s been running there continuously since 1965. I enjoyed it a lot, but watching a show about an 11-year-old girl with some real 11-year-old girls casts a different light on things: some of that enjoyment was vicarious.
We didn’t buy any Anne dolls or cookbooks, nor did we visit the “Green Gables” facsimile farmhouse, which – judging from online accounts of it – is as complete as Sherlock Holmes’s digs on Baker Street, containing everything from the slate Anne broke over Gilbert Blythe’s head to her wardrobe of puffed-sleeve dresses to the brooch she was accused, wrongly, of losing. There’s even a pretend Matthew who gives you drives around the property, though he’s not described as running to hide out in the barn at the approach of lady visitors, as the real Matthew would have done. Now I wish I’d taken in more of these sights while I had the chance, though somewhere along the way we did check out the early 20th-century one-room schoolhouse where the high double desks were just like the ones Anne would have known.
Traditionally I insert something wholley inappropriate in every post about Anne. In the past this has taken the form of references to something like leather gear fetish wear or serial killing or Gilbert’s fascination with prostate stimulation techniques, but not today. In honour of the 100th anniversary of Canada’s little darling, I’ll do no such thing and keep my post wholesome and shiny as a newly licked lollipop! … … … … … … No really …. … … … Lollipop.
What’s a deal breaker book to find on your date/lover’s shelf? In the old days, this wasn’t so much a problem. If I managed to actually make it back to someone’s apartment, I certainly wasn’t going to hit the eject button over a little Douglas Coupland. Nowadays, I’m a little more discerning. And it needn’t even be a relationship so interesting as “lovers”. I’ve broken the emergency glass and retrieved the fire axe at potential friends’ houses. Oh MY GOD! It’s The Celestine Prophecy! Gather the children and back slowly out of the dining room!
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
I’m sorry, but it’s true. I’m mercilessly judging you. Not based on what you’ve read, but based on what you’ve proudly displayed. Mind you, I might be a hypocrit here. I haven’t checked in the last little while what the Bookninja slush pile has done to my shelves. I guess I should. People even send me chicklit books. I have piles that go from dour Coetzee covers to pink pumps. A purge or controlled fire is in order.
Isabel Allende took powerful brain potions to overcome writer’s block.
Isabel Allende is describing the time she experimented with a powerful hallucinogen in an attempt to punch through the writer’s block that was preventing her from completing a trilogy of adventure books she had promised her three grandchildren. It was a few years ago, and the Chilean novelist, now 65, decided to travel to South America with her second husband to ’subject myself to the shamanic experience of ayahuasca’, a potent vision-inducing potion made from jungle vines by Amazon Indians.
But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had ‘lost his wife to the world of spirits’. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.
‘I think I went through an experience of death at a certain point, when I was no longer a body or a soul or a spirit or anything,’ Allende says matter-of-factly. ‘There was just a total, absolute void that you cannot even describe because you are not. And I think that’s death.’
Nevertheless, the process proved transformative. Allende emerged aching but lucid and was able to complete the trilogy, now being adapted for film by the co-producers of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Dudes, now that is serious commitment. Especially for a lady in her 60s. Personally, I might have taken a walk or maybe tapped a pencil on my temple for a bit. If things got dire, I might have whined some. My grandparents died before I was born, but I would like to think that if they’d lived they would have first scolded me for my own youthful dabbling in narcotics and hallucinogens, but then have gone and choked down some poisonous jungle juice later in life to give me some closure. This year Nana Allende needs to get something better than the crocheted potholder for her birthday.
Rules for Not Making Editors Hate You (from Maud) An editor is “stalked” by an unsolicited author and decides to offer some tips for not looking like an idiot.
1) Never show up in person at a publishing company. Ever. Not unless a real person (and not an imaginary person in your head) has specifically made a date with you and asked you to come in for a meeting. Even if you are just well-meaning and happen to be in the neighborhood to drop something off, seeing an editor will make that editor feel incredibly awkward and more likely to hate you and your project. We lead crazed, frazzled existences and we don’t like having to meet with people we are not expecting. Ever. None of us.
Only the good die young? Poets go earliest, but we’re all doomed to die younger than the accountants.
Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that’s not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It’s a simple fact.
Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch.
He writes that: “The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies.”
Damn. This doesn’t seem to make any distinction based on craft, skill or literary worth. This constitutes what my pappy would call a “mixed blessing”. Some people I think of as smears on the language will go sooner than I expected, but so will I. Hm. I think I can live with that. So to speak. (Thanks, Glen)
Reading in the bath is the pastime of kings, according to this Guardian blogger.
Baths are one of the few pleasures body and self can appreciate simultaneously. This is entirely because reading in the bath is the height of civilisation. Taking a bath instead of a shower is a philosophical decision – a declaration that the world will have to manage without me for a little while. And the world can stick it when I can be with a book while immersed in a coffin-shaped pool of pleasure.
The practical elements of washing are rationed out between chapters. Fifty pages in, apply shampoo; read half book, apply conditioner; finish book, get down with the soap finale. It is, for me, the height of human joy – the long soak that needs a quick blast of hot water every 40 minutes or so to keep the ecstasy at its peak.
Three hours in a bath? Um, it’s not this isn’t well written and witty, it is; nor is it the slightly fey act of soaping myself between chapters that makes me skeptical, but rather it’s that anyone who doesn’t completely suck at life has three free hours to sit in a boullion of their own dead skin cells while lazily flipping pages. I am so busy I can’t even get dressed without also checking my email, brushing my teeth, organizing the recycling and reading Al Moritz’s latest poetry book at the same time. Where the hell am I supposed to find three hours to stew in my birthday suit? And hotwater every 40 minutes or so? Where are you located, Bermuda? Here in St. John’s, that’d have to be a constant flow, b’y, or you’d end up like one of them George Street slush mummies they find every spring after the thaw in June… And while I’m on it, where the hell am I supposed to fit this bathtub bookshelf in my cramped bathroom? Excuse me while I break out my bitter-old-man cry of derision: MMEEHHHH! (Basically, all this means is that I really need a three hour bath.)
Someone please shoot me. Not because it’s coming back but because someone named it the “bonkbuster” novel. Nothing like an ever degenerating social/political/economic climate to send people running to books like this to avoid the newspaper. Luckily, there’s always some generous soul ready to bang one out.
“Oh God, oh God, you’re too sexy! I’m not sure I can make it to the bedroom,” panted Harry Levin, his tongue licking Molly’s neck like a hungry wolf. They had only just burst in through the front door and already Harry’s hand had plunged down Molly’s halter-neck to grab at her…”
Gripping stuff, but not entirely appropriate for a family newspaper. Apologies then to fans of vintage Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper who are gagging for a time when books were filled with insatiable über-millionaires on the prowl for premier-league sex and glamorous heroines with a real thirst for power. But their prayers are about to be answered. After decades of neglect, the bonkbuster is back. It’s bye-bye Bridget Jones and the misery of single life in a bedsit, and hello the champagne lifestyle of Russian oligarchs, supermodels and WAGs, set against the international backdrop of five-star hotels, yachts and private jets.
Ninja favorite Kathleen Winter wins Newfoundland’s most lucrative book prize for her short stories BoYs. Congratulations, Kathleen! We’re fans of the Winterses here at Bookninja — check out our interview with her little brother Michael, who won the inaugural Winterset award in 2000, here. Also in awards news:
Sweet biblioporn shelving links to keep you alphabetized and ready for action, baby.
- Tetris shelves
- How to design bookshelves layouts (sadly, to look good seems to require a certain dearth of “books”)
- The organic look
- 30 creative designs
I don’t know that any of these could ever replace my Ikea Billy shelves. At least pricewise. They’ve been with me since my poverty began.
Of book reveiwing. (Thanks, F)
poignant: Something you read may affect you, or move you. That doesn’t mean it’s poignant. Something is poignant when it’s keenly, even painfully, affecting. When Bambi’s mom dies an adult may think it poignant. A child probably finds it terrifying.
Speaking of the newly en-sofa-ed John Freeman, here he riffs on Jarrell’s Poetry and The Age, which is widely considered an indispensible book for the poetry critic’s library.
The age in which Jarrell published this book was tipped against him. As A. Alvarez has pointed out, “modern criticism was made necessary by modern poetry,” since modernist poetics needed criticism to explain it. But T. S. Eliot had gone a step further in directing this new critical apparatus. As he argues in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” criticism has to be impersonal and based on objective standards: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,” he writes, “but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Whatever one thinks of Eliot’s notion of Traditionand whom it did and did not includehis is not an entirely unreasonable approach to reading. The problem is, it paved the way for an almost social-scientific approach, one that in fact used words like scientific without irony. It was the sort of understanding that would one day put Robin Williams on a desk in Dead Poets Society, ripping graphs out of his students’ textbooks.
With a few exceptions, criticism in Jarrell’s age was rigorous, if not much fun, and he himself enjoyed pointing out this obvious fact. “Many of the critics one reads or meets make an odd impression about reading,” Jarrell writes in “The Age of Criticism,” “one that might be given this exaggerated emblematic form: ‘Good Lord, you don’t think I like to read, do you? Reading is serious business, not something you fool around with in your spare time.’” It is this contempt for the reader that Jarrell most frequently attacked when attacking poetry—“page after page,” he writes about an Auden poem, “the poem keeps saying: The real subject of poetry is words”—but he was equally ruthless about it in writing on criticism.
There is an urgency to Jarrell’s arguments that rings true today. There had been a seismic shift in the poetry world in 1953. Modernism had cut poetry off more than ever from its audience.
Using religion as as model to predict that desperate people will buy anything that even seems to offer answers, publishers are scrambling to bang out some self-help snake oil for the recession with titles like “How Losing Your Life Savings Will Leave You With Anal Herpes” and “The Cheney Effect: Why That Sucking Sound You Hear is Your Po’ Ass Being Flushed Down Haliburton’s Public Pay Toilet” and “Why that 29$ Bucks You Just Spent on an MBA Dropout’s Best Guess Will Save You From Forfeiting Your Children to an Illegal Alien Repoman”, to name a few.
About a year ago, one of America’s bestselling business books was Michael Corbett’s “Find It, Fix It, Flip It!: Make Millions in Real Estate — One House at a Time.” Today, one of the hot finance titles picked up for publication is Stephen Leeb’s “Game Over: How the Collapsing Economy Will Shrink Your Wealth by 50% Unless You Know What to Do.”
As the U.S. economy deteriorates and millions wrestle with questions about their faltering 401(k)s and when — or if — to cash out long-term stock investments, major publishers are scrambling to cash in.
They’re working feverishly to find the next “big book” that reflects a more sobering view of the economy and offers solutions to help Americans survive the current fiscal woes.
John Freeman just finished his run as NBCC president. Given his newfound freedom, he’s asking whether there’s too much writing about books?
This week, for the first time in two years, I started Monday with a cup of coffee, not a book section. I didn’t stab over to an online bookstore either, or spin by a literary blog. I just went to my desk and sat there. The silence was pillowy.
I don’t know how long this habit will hold, but it brought to mind that cycle of indulgence and recrimination that must be part of every book section junkie’s mental ledger. How much reading about books is enough? Is there such a thing as too much
…In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.
Stepping away from the computer for just a day, though, it’s hard not to realise our habits create that crowded forest.
Dude, didn’t you have to sign sort of exit contract with a non-competition/undermining clause? Just kidding, John. Enjoy the silence for as long as you can.
- Chip Kidd (literary darling)
- Chetan Bhagat (banker turned author)
- Hunter S Thompson (not the easiest man to live with)
A decent roundup of the effort publishing’s making to go green. If I may be so bold as to offer another suggestion, one which may address this a few other problems we tackle regularly hereabouts: don’t publish so many books.
“Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts” is an 86-page summary, printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.5 million metric tons of paper each year, is steadily, if not entirely, finding ways to make production greener.
“I was very pleasantly surprised,” said Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program which has worked extensively with publishers on environmental issues. “We’re seeing a groundswell of momentum and real measurable progress.”
Commercially, publishers have certainly discovered the benefits of green, with bestsellers including Deirdre Imus’ “Green This!” and Al Gore’s companion guide to the Academy Award-winning movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Environmental themes can be found in novels, children’s stories and business books.
But reading books is healthier than making them. The climate impact survey, released this month and co-commissioned by Green Press and the nonprofit Book Industry Study Group, offers a mixed picture about industry practices.
This book sounds fascinating–evolution did not “intend” for us to read, but the fact that we do has changed everything.
Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.
This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don’t.
One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on. This means that reading is an act of improvisation – when you read, you’re actually using parts of the brain that were designed to do other things. You are, as it were, patching together several different technologies.
That’s why lots of people can’t read very well – until very recently in human history, the ability to read written language was not adaptive; it conferred no advantages. But 50,000 years ago, on the savannah or the steppes, the dyslexic brain might well have given its possessor an edge.
And I don’t mean Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with that very tired-looking Ford playing Indy’s granddad. Small bookstores are making a comeback, at least in Toronto. I knowt because’n the noospapermans telled me so.
Such bookstores closed in droves in Toronto in the past decade, killed by the Chapters/Indigo juggernaut and Amazon.ca.
But something odd is happening in Toronto: New little bookstores are popping up like crocuses in the spring earth. Type, the eclectic bookshop that two Toronto scholars opened two years ago on Queen Street West across from Trinity-Bellwoods Park, last November opened a second store in a nook in Forest Hill Village. And two weeks ago, Book City, the 32-year-old chain of small bookstores, gave Type some competition of its own, opening a location on Queen West. Type and Book City share the same streetcar stop, Niagara Street.
Ben McNally opened a boutique bookstore on Bay Street last year, and next year Winnipeg-based McNally Robinson, Canada’s largest independent bookstore (No relation to Ben) is opening a location in Don Mills.
What gives? It appears that, Internet age be damned, a growing number of people like to read actual books, and seek them out in little shops with literate staff.
I find it deeply tickling that the only adjective used for staff is “literate” and that this is juxtaposed with a picture is of Book City. Mind you, that doesn’t apply to all locations. I quite like the people at the Bloor West and Danforth locations. But unless things have radically changed since I was last there, and with the exception of at least one part-time ‘Ninja, one of the other locations can generally be described with any number of synonyms of “sour”. I guess “unhappy” is probably the closest to what it feels like. It’s like shopping in a graveyard of resentful zombies.
JK will appear in a New York court to try to block the publication of the book that will destroy her empire. Surely there’s a novel in all this unfair suffering and pain imposed on an oppressed author.
Rowling is seeking unspecified damages against RDR Books, which describes its Harry Potter Lexicon as “the most trusted reference source on Earth about the wonderful world of Harry Potter”.
An injunction is currently preventing the publishers from proceeding with sales or even marketing the book.
Rowling said last year the book threatened a similar reference guide she was planning to release.
“I cannot, therefore, approve of ‘companion books’ or ‘encyclopedias’ that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors’ own personal gain,” she said in a statement.
It’s awful when greed and personal gain enter the equation, init J? How dare they sully pristine efforts to make the world a better place with a bloated fantasy reference book.
Bob Hoover makes a interesting point in his column, as he is wont to do, that the job of policing distinct lines between “truth” and “fiction” in manuscripts actually lies with the author, not the editor, who is concerned with literary quality and, to some extent, making the book competitive. Who’s job is it then? With all the cutbacks in staff, no one knows, and responsibility is falling more and more to the authors (who, as we’ve seen, are a pack of baby-eating monsters with reality issues).
Every word of “Love and Consequences,” including the “the’s” and the “and’s,” (thank you, Mary McCarthy) was a lie. Yet, for three years, her editor at Riverhead Books, Sarah McGrath, apparently never challenged Seltzer’s work. It took the author’s sister to blow the whistle on her fraud, and the book was pulled from sale.
Publishers are not in the business of verifying every fact. They concentrate mainly on checking for plagiarism and libel.
It’s not part of their tradition to challenge the contents of their authors’ work, but to judge whether the book will succeed in a very competitive market.
“The most important thing for an editor, in my opinion, is keep the job separate from the policing functions of publishing,” said Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction and poetry at the New Yorker magazine and Random House for more than 35 years.
Tom Sykes’s publisher did what it seems most others can’t: fact-checked his addiction memoir. Now that weren’t so hard, were it?
As the author of a memoir myself, I understand only too well the temptations writers face to sex-up their stories. But in my case, creativity with the truth was simply not an option: just days after I submitted the manuscript the American media went into a frenzy when the writer James Frey was revealed to have invented large swathes of his bestselling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
My book is an addiction memoir as well, and so my publisher sat me down with a lawyer, who went through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, determined to root out any inaccuracies or embellishments. They then encouraged me to send excerpts of the manuscript to anybody who was mentioned in the book, and get them to confirm that what I had written about them was accurate.
This seemed over the top to me (whatever happened to publish and be damned?) but it was a paranoid time in memoir-land, so I went along with it, even tracking down old school friends I hadn’t seen for 20 years and sending them emails that said things such as: “Er, Hi, I’ve written a book and you’re in it. This is what I wrote about you. Is it OK?”
Does the story have a future in video games? I know at least a few games which, on premise alone, would make great novels, and their pacing is becoming more and more centred around narrative and revelation instead of just mindless shooting (don’t worry, folks, there’s still plenty of shooting). Well, if not stories, do libraries at least have a future with them? Apparently. At the NYPL, video games are no longer the red-headed stepchild of the intellectual set. (I’m just keen to see those tight-sweater-wearing, horn-rimmed, stern-look-shooting devils known as librarians get in on it. What could be sexier than a passel of ostensibly-repressed book hotties sweating out a LAN game of Team Fortress 2? There’d be frazzled buns and crooked glasses everywhere! Browr.)
“Especially at this pivotal moment in our history, it is so great to have so many people of this age group here in the library, because it foreshadows what life is going to be like around here when we have transformed this building,” he said. “We want to do a better job of integrating the circulation and research collections, and part of that is becoming more relevant for a younger audience.”
Jack Martin, the library’s assistant coordinator for young adult services and the mastermind of the “Game On” project, said the library was in some ways only catching up with libraries in Ann Arbor, Mich., Los Angeles and parts of New England in making video games part of its programs and collections.
“What we’re seeing is that in addition to simply helping bring kids into the library in the first place, games are having a broader effect on players, and they have the potential to be a great teaching tool,” Mr. Martin said. “If a kid takes a test and fails, that’s it. But in a game, if you fail you get to take what you’ve learned and try again.
“In a lot of these games you have to understand the rules, you have to understand the game’s world, its story. For some games you have to understand its history and the characters in order to play effectively.”
But even deeper than this is the advent of the multi-media story that incorporates games, blogs, puzzles, etc., like the We Tell Stories project at Penguin.
Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.
It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.
- Could Indigo buy Borders?
- Rowling has suffered depression (no, I will NOT comment on what we’ve suffered, thank you very much)
- Hummers and __________ (insert personal peeve here) got nothing on the “superbook” for sheer hubris
- Brave New Movie
- Who is the new AC Clarke? (I always thought Clarke was the new Clarke)
- RIP: Raymond Leblanc, publisher of Tintin, dead at 92
- RIP: Hugo Claus, Belgian writer, dead at 78
- RIP: Aaron Asher, editor, dead at 78
- Sara Paretsky around new book with fewer deaths, more misery
- RL Stine rising from the grave to haunt new generation
- Ken Kesey in Mexico
- Bret Easton Ellis reappreciated
PW gives a nice primer on British independent booksellers and their allied ilk.
U.K. independents come in many shapes and colors with little in common, apart from their lack of conglomerate size, to define them as a species. Some are literary to the point of preciousness, while others cheerfully chase any and all sales regardless of merit. They may publish 200 titles a year, or 10. Many specialize in nonfiction, in niches broad and narrow, though a distinguished minority concentrates on fiction, and some do both.
Their size, however, does give them one more pertinent common feature, neatly summed up by a publisher who has operated at both ends of the scale. “The bigger you are, the more you’re affected by the market,” says Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of U.K. market leader Hachette Livre U.K. “If you’re small, you make your own success.”
Cory Doctorow points to, and comments on, a piece reminding us that whatever e-Books we “purchace” aren’t actually “owned”, but rather licensed.
If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term “buy.” Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.
In other e-news, are text book writers getting the e-shaft up their e-holes now that things are going digital? (Top item)
What would the US canon look like without Gatsby? Or with a radically altered version? The Globe counts Fitzgerald’s book as one of the 50 greatest ever. (Survey says? MAH! But we can argue that another day.)
How much poorer would our culture be if F. Scott Fitzgerald had, as he originally intended, set The Great Gatsby in the Midwest in 1885, and called it The High-Bouncing Lover? Such a question is impossible to answer, for we can only guess at how barren the U.S. literary landscape would appear without Gatsby’s West Egg mansion in it, just as we can scarcely conceive of a U.S. canon of literature without Fitzgerald himself.
See, I would have taken this a step further and asked what would have happened if it were HP Lovecraft who had written Gatsby instead and Carraway’s face was sucked off by a mass of pulsating tentacles from a beast too horrific to name. Now THAT would be interesting.
A model who didn’t actually write her own book is up for kiddie book of the year. Fits of apoplexy to follow:
Price’s Perfect Ponies: My Pony Care Book has been shortlisted for the prestigious WH Smith Children’s Book of the Year award at the “Oscars” of the book trade – a decision that has whipped large sections of the literary world into a ferment of disapproval because she did not write it all herself.
According to her publishers, Price, one of the most commercially successful writers in the country, is a “brand” and it is impossible to quantify how much of the book she wrote.
The Society of Authors has been inundated with complaints from concerned members. Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, who chairs the organisation, said: “I’m shocked. I’m amazed the publishers even put the book up. If it’s ghost-written then it’s inappropriate that it should be shortlisted. I am disappointed by the judges.”
Maybe she’s nominated because there’s no denying she looks great in a picture book… badump bump! Or maybe because she’s so thin you can easily use her as a bookmark… Zing! Or crack her spine? Yowsa! Or maybe it’s that you should always pair a ghost author with a skeleton author… Booyah! I got a million of ‘em! I’m just getting started! Or maybe it’s just that she has great french flaps… um… wait… this has gone too far. Scratch that last one. Even I don’t want to guess what that might mean…
I hit the snooze two or three times, but yeah, I’m up. While I go scratch my belly and smack my lips in the mirror, you read these news items.
I’m busy today taking care of my five-year-old ‘Ninja apprentice, and nervously tapping my fingers wondering if my zero-year-old will arrive soon. Plus, I’ve got to come up with and explanation about why we’re celebrating the bloody, torturous murder of a teacher from 2000 years ago with rabbits and chocolate. My best try so far is: “Well, you see, son… mmrph mufflemrp, frmplestumpf.” A little help?
The Danish Mohammed cartoons are still raising temperatures around world, some to the point at which stuff burns. The NYT reports:
Now many Europeans seem fed up. Over dinner in Copenhagen recently, Mr. Rose, who has made something of a second career out of the cartoon fallout, said it all came late but was inevitable.
“At the time, in 2006, there were good journalistic reasons for other newspapers to publish the cartoons because few people had seen them then, so they were news,” he said. “Now the journalistic justification is almost nonexistent because everyone knows what they look like, so it’s more about solidarity than about news.”
Unlike Mr. Westergaard, Mr. Rose doesn’t live in safe houses, although he long ago removed his name from the local telephone directory and has learned that a different Flemming Rose (there are apparently several in Denmark) decided to change his name.
“It was not about mocking a minority but a religious figure, the Prophet, so it was blasphemy, not racism,” Mr. Rose said of the cartoons. “The idea of challenging religious authority led to liberal democracy, whereas the singling out of minorities, as minorities, led to Nazism and the persecution of the bourgeoisie in Russia. So this distinction is crucial to understand.”
Meanwhile, Osama bin Hidin’ peeks his nose out to say “We kill you all!” regarding said same.
Like you knew they would, the papers are getting around to a combination of encomium and mudslinging. The Guardian has a comprehensive obit, while The Times looks at his life through the lens of a charge of pedophilia. The NYT hangs its piece on his role in shaping Kubrick’s 2001 while the SMH goes for the space prophet angle. Jessa points to a more telling piece than any obit: an essay Clarke wrote about his correspondence with George Bernard Shaw in which they discuss “velocity”. BoingBoing points to Clarke’s last interview here.
- Book judges announce (Jane Smiley to head)
- First edition Hobbit fetches what bankers refer to as “a whole ass-load of scratch”
- Penguin tells stories (I love how publishers are finally TRYING! with the web)
- A farewell to zines?
A Guardian blogger riffs on the idea that literary loves don’t fade with age (but rather remain motley and dark like liverspots that may or may not be precancerous nodules rising from the unmade bed of your hanging skin).
As Proust’s Baron de Charlus observed rather acidly: “You have not, perhaps, any personal merit – I’ve no idea, so few people have! But for a time at least you have youth, and that is always an attraction.”However, there are some benefits to ageing. As our body changes, so do our tastes. I used to think, for example, that Les McKeown from the Bay City Rollers was the most handsome, cleverest, most miraculous man alive. This is no longer an opinion I hold. I also used to dream about Adam Ant sharing his eye-liner with me. Now I can afford my own eye-liner and wouldn’t dream of sharing anyone else’s, particularly not Mr Ant’s.
But one thing that has struck me is how the literary heartthrobs of our youth don’t ever change.
Um, I guess that’s a matter of when you start counting. ‘Cause I’m just not digging the Stephen King and Larry Niven as much as I used to. Mind you, I still love Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood, fiction and poetry both, in a nostalgic sort of way, despite ageing away as a writer from their styles. So maybe there’s some truth to it after all.
The drama continues.
Author, futurist, dead at 90. One of the great lights of the last 100 years has gone out. I’ve probably read 30 of his books.
Mildly mocking the claim of Philip Hensher that he reads five novels a week, Michael Henderson puts in a few good words for the slow reader, as a sub-species.
What a relief it was, last year, to learn of Milan Kundera’s opinion that he based his reading on the premise that he got through books at the rate of 20 pages an hour. How the Society of Slow Readers enjoyed that confession!
There are those who read quickly, but many more, I fancy, are closer to Kundera’s estimation than Hensher’s. Keen reader that I am, I reckon I have done pretty well if, having spent three hours with a book, I have got through 100 pages.
Once I regretted being a slowcoach. Now I am content with my lot. It’s like a cricketer building an innings. If a book is worth reading, it must be absorbed, sentence by sentence, which often means re-reading paragraphs if they are tricky – or if they are delightful. If others are able to zip through books, skimming the pages, it is a matter for them.
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on what constitutes lying in fiction, and asks whether any book can be considered “true”.
What makes a book a history? In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books “histories,” smack on the title page. No one was more brash about this than Henry Fielding, who, in his 1749 “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” included a chapter called “Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not Write Such Histories as This.” Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote.
“I shall not look on myself as accountable to any Court of Critical Jurisdiction whatever: For as I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing,” Fielding explained. Tom Jones’s claim to truth is different from Margaret Jones’s. Earlier this month, Jones, also known as Margaret Seltzer, tried to pass off a gangland bildungsroman as the story of her life. Pulped days after it was published, the book, titled “Love and Consequences,” is a fraud; “Tom Jones” is not. Fielding was playing; Seltzer was just lying.
But Fielding meant it when he said that “Tom Jones” was true, and there’s a sense in which he was right. History matters, but the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim.
What happens when you, friend of writers, find yourself in your friends’ work? Worse still, what happens when you don’t like the character? I remember Michael Winter saying he’d come close to a few thrashings over just this sort of thing.
Spool back 36 years, and there were Duncan Campbell (the author of the book, as well as a distinguished journalist on this paper) and I, lolling below the monkey temple in Kathmandu, writing a mock rock opera about the hippie trail called Hepatitis! (Then, any musical worth its salt had an exclamation mark in its title). Duncan was handsome, witty, Scots and had recently resigned from an advertising agency; I was less handsome, less witty and Welsh.
Balding! Portly! American! How could Duncan do it to me? The “American” I can just about take (it’s important for the plot), but the “balding”? Why, Duncan once told me I’d first attracted his attention in the Delhi dosshouse where we met because he thought I was a girl, so luxuriant was my hennaed hair.
I haven’t been so upset since another friend, Sam Llewellyn, gave my name to the lead character in his seafaring thriller, The Iron Hotel. According to the blurb, the book was “a powerful examination of one man’s attempt to impose some rightness on a world that’s wrong from bottom to top”. I rang him to comment on the nobility he’d conferred on my good name. “Yes,” he said, “I was taking the piss.”
In my world, this is merely a pantsing/wedgie offence. But if you get the adjectives wrong, this can be escalated all the way up to either a rear admiral or an atomic wedgie. Write at your own risk.
The NYT examines the NYPL upgrade that includes changing the name of the flagship branch at 42nd and 5th from a “what’s happened to the libraries we grew up with?” angle.
Not too long ago I stumbled away from a small branch library in high-minded despair; it seemed to specialize in stained paperback best sellers while shelves of classic fiction were stocked with scarcely more than “Oliver Twist.” Barnes & Noble, I thought, offered better browsing possibilities, and maybe that was why its stores seemed to be supplanting libraries as gathering places where books were read and conversations begun. It seemed as if neighborhood libraries, like those that are part of the New York Public Library as well as the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, were doomed to become less compelling than a retail chain.
But what might be possible if those libraries became more like the one I remember from my Brooklyn childhood, where it was a thrill to move from the children’s floor to the adult floor, to begin to explore, author by author, the texture of the unknown? That possibility is latent in the library’s plans, even in its creation of an extensive below-ground lending library just past Fifth Avenue’s lion-framed portals. And the temptation? That, I thought at first, would be related to the promise. Bookstores, having successfully imitated libraries, might now be emulated in turn. The Fifth Avenue library’s character could end up transformed by that commercial model. This great free library, in which generations of immigrants and aspirants had schooled themselves and found their ambitions ennobled, would be subject to “democratization,” as one library official put it.
Once again we are at the time of year when people start to gripe about, for or against, the Orange Prize. I guess I’ve been in this thing too long to care anymore. It’s the same thing every year: arguments against are mostly vacuous anti-feminist rants, and arguments for aren’t much better being mostly vacuous pro-feminist rants. What we need are a bunch of sociologists to weigh in here and give us a wider view of the cultures involved. Until then, here’s the announcement and here’s A.S. Byatt calling the prize sexist.
The Orange prize longlist, published yesterday, includes Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the unisex Booker a few weeks ago. In the past two years, women have won both the Booker and Costa literary awards.
The novelist A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a sexist prize, saying that she was so critical of what it stands for that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration. “Such a prize was never needed,” she said, noting that many works of literature were by women.
John Sutherland, the academic, said that ghettoising women writers did them more harm them good. Anita Brookner, a Booker winner, has dismissed positive discrimination and is also believed to have declined having her novels entered for the Orange.
Apparently it’s cool to have a sort of Halloween dedicated to the ridicule of a people driven to drink by poverty and discrimination. (I know, cry me a river, right? But look it up.) Anyway, the two positive outcomes are that: a) I have a holiday, and b) I get to indiscriminately beat people who dress like retarded leprechauns and talk in an Irish/pirate hybrid accent. So I have to get at it, if you don’t mind. Top o’ the marnin’ to yeh.
- Paris bookfair bomb threat
- The amazing Lawrence Hill and C.S. Richardson make Commonwealth uber-list
- Jewish school director fired/resigns over poetry row
- NYPL name change (my personal opinion? Hubris.)
- Julian Barnes profile
- Asian “Booker” winner translated
- John Banville introduces Seamus Heaney in the Guardian great poets series
- On poor enunciation
- Trainspotting prequel?
- Novelists strike fails to affect nation whatsoever
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