Okay, I’m back. Sleepy and covered in poo, but back, for at least some news roundups. Can you believe some people emailed complaining that links weren’t being posted? I’ll endeavour to provide more efficient service for their well-spent dollars in the future. For the earnestness-inclined, that was bitter sarcasm.

• Lonely Planet writer lied. No, he didn’t. Yes, he did.
• Lost Dumas found, most likely by Indiana Jones, and made bestseller
• Rowling gets Galaxy award…
• then promptly goes to court to crush fans… (though I am starting to sympathize with her on some aspects of the web/print divide)
• and tells paper that Potter “saved” her sanity — messianic delusions, I tells ya –
• but on the bright side, she’s lending her gold plated name to Darfur relief
• Publisher surrenders to threats from nutbar Tom Cruise and his insane alien cult
• Rumsfeld to publish memoirs, 75% of which will either be be redacted or replaced with lies to prevent a civil war — oh, who am I kidding… North America is too fat for a civil war. Maybe if it was conducted in a MPORPG and Cheetos were provided. They’ve fattened us up to ensure sedentery reactions to what would have caused rioting in the past. Mmm. Pass me another hegemony burger.
• 2000 say goodbye to Mailer (some probably said good riddance too)
• But everybody likes Philip Roth
• Tom Clancy’s home burns, quite possibly from the heat of his poorly ventilated ghostwriter sweatshop in the basement
• Tom, in the future, if you don’t want this kind of mess, you might consider having robots (as opposed to automatons) write your books — this guy has done 200,000 books that way
• Orange Prize shortlist still has three first timers, including two Canadians
  
• Article on book illos for kids (illos, not article is for kids)
• Random House launches search-inside-books tool
• Ah the smell of musty books… Scientists, those laffy-daffy yuck-factories of the labcoat set, have come up with a rotten book sniffer
• Jeet Heer on comics, Chabon responds

All is well, and young lad August Kenneth is now part of the world at a whopping 10lbs 4oz. Pictures and details to follow, but I haven’t slept in 36, so I probably won’t post again until Monday at the earliest. Have a virtual cigar.

The NYT reports that a new Zora Neale Hurston doc shows her to be an early adopter of the unreliable narrator in autobiography.

It wasn’t enough, apparently, for Zora Neale Hurston to write a great American novel and to blaze trails for black women as a scholar and an artist. In “Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun,” an “American Masters” documentary on Wednesday night on PBS, we learn that she also pioneered a very 21st-century genre: the unreliable memoir.

In her speeches and writings – including her autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” which is liberally quoted by the film’s narrator, S. Epatha Merkerson – Hurston shaved a decade from her age and substituted the all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., where she grew up, for her actual birthplace in Alabama. The film doesn’t speculate about her reasons, but we can: perhaps when being a black woman in the Jim Crow South means that you finish high school at 27 and don’t become the first black graduate of Barnard College (with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology) until 36, you find it practical to obscure your age.

BoingBoing points to an interesting yet possibly-not-unexpected (phonic vs symbolic) study that shows dyslexia occurs in different brain regions for native English and Chinese speakers. This means that some English students learning Chinese may find their symptoms disappear when working in Mandarin.

“Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” explained Eden, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.

For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.

For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

“The implication here is that when we see a reading disability, we see it in different parts of the brain depending on the writing system that the child is born into,” Eden said.

That means, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said in a telephone interview.

Tan said the new findings suggest that treating Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills, while current treatments of English dyslexia focus on letter-sound conversions and sound awareness.

This kind of bookstore pr0n is a staple of arts/architecture/travel pages these days as well. But I LIKE these ones.

Selexyz Dominicanen – a store created from a merger between the town’s Bergman’s bookshop, the Academische Boekhandel, and the Dutch Selexyz bookshop chain – is housed in the thrilling setting of a 13th-century Dominican church. This haunting building was once part of a friary knocked about over the centuries by various invading armies. Right up until last Christmas, in possibly its strangest incarnation, it was being used by the citizens of Maastricht as a glorious, or possibly inglorious, indoor bike pound. As for the Dominicans, they were driven out by Napoleon in 1794. After a brief spell as a parish church, this magnificent Gothic prayer hall – it has no tower or transepts, in keeping with the rules of the clerical order that built it – was turned into nothing holier than a warehouse.

Today, the church, consecrated in 1294, could hardly be more popular. The beautifully restored building is an attraction in its own right, and yet the installation of a towering, three-storey black steel bookstack in the long, high nave, together with a fashionable if somewhat noisy cafe in the choir, works extraordinarily well. Church and bookshop look as if they might have been made for one another.

It seems as though one of these artistic envy articles pops up every month these days, reminding us that we can’t ignore what petty fucks we are—but since this one’s centred around ‘Ninjatastic novelist/actor/playwright Sean Dixon, I thought I’d break my no Post policy and link in.

When Canadian author Sean Dixon published his first novel last June, he was rewarded with a two-book contract by HarperCollins U.K. and given a $100,000 advance. This payday made for splashy headlines on the Quill & Quire website and brought attention to Coach House Books, his boutique Toronto-based publisher. But if Dixon, 43, was suddenly the envy of would-be novelists across the country, he was also able to empathize. After two decades as an artist staving off back surgery to pay the rent of his Toronto apartment, Dixon understands how resentment works in the arts.

“Labouring as a playwright, I saw how when a play becomes successful suddenly the author is the toast of the town,” says Dixon, currently working on his follow-up to the novel in question, The Girls Who Saw Everything. (He will also be publishing the story “Sic Transit Gloria at the Humber Loop” in the upcoming short-story collection Toronto Noir, due May 1 from Akashic books.) “I remember seeing a play by Michael Healey with an actress friend and she said, ‘I think he’s a genius.’ My thought was, ‘Why can’t I be the genius?’ There was keen envy in the moment, for sure.”

• This year’s Guggenheim awards include quite a number of poets, including our own Tim Bowling
• DK goes green
• The Griffin Prize shortlist (which may soon need to be renamed the Erin Mouré Yearly Nod)
• Getting Pulitzered next to Dylan who is being called Rock’s first Pulitzer (I always knew there was more reason to hate the Boomers than just the socio-politico-enviro-economical mess we’re in)
• How to refer to the profession of sperm dealing… Maud points to this neologistic condundrum (my contribution to this debate-worthy-of-the-ages is: if we refer to a drug dealer as a “pusher”, we might perhaps refer to a sperm dealer most accurately as a “puller”)

Salman Rushdie is standing up for what he doesn’t believe in. That’s brave and noble, but I’m sure there are a few long knives being sharpened in the dark somewhere out there right now. Actually, these days they’re probably outfitting those knives with laser sights and attaching them to trained radioactive sharks. But it still all goes back to the same roots.

SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE has confessed that he pretended to “embrace Islam” in the hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him.

The author issued a statement in 1990 in order to defuse the row about his novel The Satanic Verses, which had provoked Muslims across the world. He claimed he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world.

However, in an interview to be broadcast next month, Rushdie now claims his reversion to the religion of his birth was all a “pretence”.

Congratulations to this young man—a literary young buck, as the case may be, caught in the proverbial headlights of fame.

Until recently, Adam Foulds’s most useful qualification was his fork-lift-truck driving licence – a certificate which allowed him to earn enough as a warehouse assistant to pay the bills while leaving his head free to think about writing. On April 6, he put his fork-lift truck driver days behind him in accepting the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his highly accomplished first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The £5,000 award has long been seen as a prescient indicator of literary success: past winners include William Dalrymple, Zadie Smith and Simon Armitage.

What is it with the English and “useful”. It’s that damn Thomas the Tank Engine, I tell you. It teaches kids well-mannered backstabbing, reinforces class divides and gender scripts, and encourages a sort of feudal pandering to authority figures. Plus, they look fucking creepy when they shoot their lidless eyes back and forth like that.

Junot Diaz for fiction and Robert Haas shares with Philip Schultz for poetry. And there are some other categories, including, I think, best LOLCats caption, but I can’t remember what they are right now.

Get it? Because of the “saurus” part? It’s like a dinosaur? Which are extinct? See? The paperback Roget is headed to stop that great door in the sky. The culprit? You guessed it.

Happily, if the computer processing of words is killing reference books, it’s also making them better. In particular, word reference is morphing faster and smarter than any other kind of compendium out there. The innovation is not just a matter of a new medium that permits us to get online what we used to turn pages for. There has been an evolutionary leap, too: The digitization of words in time allows us to see language as it really is—not so much an abstract code as a dynamic system.

One of the most important spurs to word research is the increased use of the corpus, the term used to refer to any large body of written or spoken communications, be it a collection of medieval manuscripts or a folder of sound files. Diverse scholars of language have long amassed corpora, such as books on particular topics or writings by particular people, in order to analyze the language of the whole. Before the computer era, corpus work required painstaking, slow tabulation. With a computerized corpus, you can search and count (and run any other kind of linguistic analysis) with greater ease. Corpus linguistics means that the language of thousands of people can be mined by lexicographers, reflecting the facts of English as it is spoken or written by a population, not just English as it was spoken by Peter Mark Roget. If Roget’s Thesaurus, along with Webster’s and Johnson’s original dictionaries, is the idiosyncratic cartography of brilliant 19^th-century explorers, then this stuff is GPS.

Amazon is angry at UK publishers for selling books at a deep discount through their own sites. Well, well, well. How the worm has turned. Next it’ll be Walmart complaining that starving little third world kids are unfairly competitive because their shantytown markets are selling the same name brand merch for pennies to tourists. One way or another, it’s the book-buying public who will at first reap the benefits of this, and later reap the whirlwind.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

Penguin’s online store has reduced a boxed set of 20 Penguin Epics from £100 to £55. Amazon sells the collection at £98.64. Bloomsbury offers a 25 per cent discount on all its books, with free postage and packing on British deliveries over £20.

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.

That friggin’ whirlwind bit is so cool. Like a Kurt Russell-level-of-cool. It’s like the word “torque”. You just have to slip it in where ever you can and the ladies come a-runnin’. Aw yeah.

Don’t you love it when obssessions come together? I got two words for you: CHOCOLATE PENCILS.

A couple ‘Ninja-types are featured in this Gazette article speculating on whether Canada has a poetry capital. Apparently, I’m a traitor to teh internets. If I had known you could answer “a series of tubes” in place of an actual capital, I might have. Or I might have forked myself in the eye. I’m impulsive like that.

April is national poetry month. We have a national poet laureate, Newfoundlander John Steffler. We have poetry quotations on our $10 and $100 bills. Shouldn’t there also be a poetry capital of Canada?

And if so, what place would qualify? Would it be a metropolis of meter and rhyme, or something smaller, a village of verse?

A French-language poetry capital would probably be somewhere in Quebec, but what about an English capital? Maybe it, too, would be in Quebec, like Montreal, the home of poets F.R. Scott, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen and arguably the city possessing Canada’s richest poetry heritage.

Some publishers are including prepared questions for discussion at the back of their books, like the lit version of shake-and-bake or cup-a-soup, prompting readers to think in terms of sample book club chatter.

The novel’s story line isn’t all that hard to follow, so by the time I reached the end, I had a pretty clear idea that Olga hadn’t gotten a fair shake in life. Be that as it may, I was startled when I turned to the back of the book and encountered eight questions prepared for book clubs that might be interested in discussing the novel further. Question No. 5 ran like this: “Olga has been driven from her homeland by the Bolsheviks, raped by a soldier, abandoned by her husband, treated with indifference by her lover, drugged, sexually violated and impregnated by her son. Does the novel lay the blame for Olga’s fate on the shoulders of the men in her world? Would you?”

At first, I thought this question might be a fluke or an oversight, but then I paged through a pile of other novels containing similar supplementary materials. Now it became clear to me that seemingly off-the-wall questions were a staple of the genre, deliberately included to shake up the musty old world of literature and force readers to think “outside the box.”

Not so sure what this box is supposed to be “outside”, because it looks startling like the inside of the highschool-lit-class box. Damn hegemony boxes! It’s like living in a Matryoshka doll.

• Emory shows off its poetry collection
• Ian Flemming, real-life espionage strategist
• Writers and Co is celebrating NatPoMo by talking to John Felstiner, a Celan scholar

The Telegraph offers a list of 110 books to make the “perfect” library. Can you see flaws in their reasoning? What’s missing? What doesn’t deserve shelf space next to your choices?

Thanks to everyone who pointed out that between this article on dying bloggers and the previous one on poets, I’m pretty much already dead.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

As I said to at least one of you, all this proves, given only a few years of data to correalate, is that the kind of people drawn to blogging are those who have led lives already prone to heart attacks. Now, this doesn’t change much about my chances of dropping dead, but I like living on the edge. Keeps me sharp and humble. And I have a few people lined up to haunt anyway, so I won’t be bored. That’s really what I fear about death. Not that your consciousness snuffs out, but that it doesn’t, and you’re just left staring at a blank screen. Hm. Might be nice to have some peace and quiet though.

Egad, have we come to this? A novel written by a fictional character on a soap opera has been published with a major house in the US and is burning up the charts. You know what this means, don’t you? Even fake authors are doing better than you. Think about that. I’ll be handing out cups of Kool-Aid and nooses at the door on the way out.

Barely two months after Kendall, who is played by the actress Alicia Minshew, set down those first few deathless words, “It was one of those brutally hot, muggy days in August,” her first novel “Charm” was released in the fictional small town of Pine Valley, Pa., as part of the soap’s story line. Concurrently, “Charm” — an actual hardback with a list price of $21.95 — became available in real-life bookstores around the country.

“Charm” was published by Hyperion, which like its sister company that owns “All My Children,” Disney-ABC Television Group, is a Disney property. It has sold more than 100,000 copies and made its debut in February at No. 13 on the New York Times best-seller list. (It has Kendall’s name on the cover but the name of the actual writer is being kept secret.)

Making things even more convoluted, the Hyperion executive editor, Gretchen Young, and the publicity director, Beth Gebhard, had walk-on parts in the publishing party scene on the show, and a fragrance called Charm, which is a product of the cosmetics company in the novel as well as a plot point on the soap, will be on sale in Sears stores nationwide beginning April 14.

Please tell me this is a dream sequence that will be revealed as an alternate timeline when Dakota returns and takes Chastity’s offer of asylum from the Forsight Fortune’s evil Manning Powers whose grudge runs back to Dakota’s accidental killing of Cyril, Manning’s little brother who was betrothed to Hope, but had eloped with China right before they were both kidnapped by Akiko, the Yakuza assassin hired by Christian Stryker, Dakota’s biological father, and also perhaps his uncle, but only if Elizabeth Charrington is really the mother of Ashley Wuthers. Cause otherwise, I just can’t take it.

Rags to riches stories on the internet almost read like fairy tales: pauper rejected by life and love (publishers) casts his only possessions (his sci-fi horror novels) to the wind (as free downloads). Fairy godpeople (small Canadian genre publisher) descend on shoddily concealed wiring (CC block grant?) and turn pauper into handsome groom (no. 7 on Amazon!) so he can marry the handsome prince (Crown publishing)—but only in Boston.

Scott Sigler and Seth Harwood have spent the past few years writing novels, disseminating them over the Internet as serialized podcasts and amassing audiences so considerable that top-shelf agents and publishers are now eager to represent the authors.

But well before Sigler revealed podcasting as a new frontier for book promotion, the San Francisco author was rebuffed hundreds of times by major publishers. Sigler’s science fiction-horror thrillers attracted little attention.

That changed in 2005, when he offered his first novel, “Earthcore,” as a free, downloadable 22-episode podcast on iTunes and his own Web site, www.scottsigler.com. A few hundred early listeners soon swelled to 5,000. By the time he posted “Ancestor” and “The Rookie,” his second and third books, which he also narrated, he had 30,000 digital disciples.

Sigler refers to these loyal listeners as junkies because they keep coming back for more. It was the junkies who helped him land a deal with Dragon Moon Press, a small Canadian fantasy and science fiction publisher that liked the idea of a newbie author with a sizable following. It was the junkies who helped Sigler’s “Ancestor” climb to No. 7 in overall sales on Amazon.com, which played a role in landing him a deal with the Crown Publishing Group.

• Russell Banks
• Jodi Picoult
• Richard Yates

• British writer starts in to magnum opus: Anna Nicole Smith opera
• Alberta literary shortlists
• Celebrity drops out as Orange Prize judge, new pretty girl sought desperately by feminist organization
• $50G poetry prize goes to Tony Hoagland
• The text of On the Road visually interpreted
• Mead to offer “grad school ruled” notebooks

(Holy crap, my Radar Love mp3 won’t play. The file is corrupt. Wheeze wheeze. It’s okay, George. Just calm down and think. THINK, dammit! There’s got to be a way to get a fix. Wheeze wheeze. Anyone got a paper bag I can borrow?)

The incomparable Maud links to this NYRB piece on Steinbeck that I didn’t have time to read through, but get the gist of: If he’s so bad, how come he’s still everywhere forty years later.

So if all of Steinbeck is in print forty years after his death (in 1968), and despite the force-feeding of hundreds of thousands of school kids with his work—and official canonization by the Library of America—why is he so decisively off the literary map? Other than Brad Leithauser, who in 1989 published a perceptive fiftieth-anniversary homage to The Grapes of Wrath, who in America considers him seriously today, apart from a handful of Steinbeck academics and some local enthusiasts in Monterey?

Nor is dismissal of his work by the literary establishment anything new. When to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he won the 1962 Nobel Prize, the reaction was startlingly hostile. “Without detracting in the least from Mr. Steinbeck’s accomplishments,” ran a New York Times editorial, “we think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer …whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age.” And on the eve of the award ceremony in Stockholm, Arthur Mizener, again in the Times, questioned why the Nobel committee would reward a writer whose “limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing.” It’s a question difficult to answer. (Steinbeck himself had doubts. When asked by a reporter whether he believed he deserved the prize, he responded, “Frankly, no.”)

This philosophizing—his compulsion to hector us with heavy-handed opinions and ideas—remains one of the chief obstacles to reading Steinbeck with pleasure today. Like so many other writers of his time, he’s disgusted with capitalism, yet he’s not really a revolutionary—he comes across more as a disaffected adolescent, dishing out a kind of callow cynicism. Although he’s constantly laying down the moral law and grappling with the larger issues, he’s not an abstract thinker or theorist. Instead, he’s got a chip on his soul—a suspicion of formal education, a resentment of authority and institutions. (It’s that resentment which undoubtedly kept him from joining the Party, even at the peak of his radicalism in the Thirties.) In other words, he has the ardor and sincerity—and the confused notions—typical of so many intelligent autodidacts.

(Okay, I’ve now progressed to Steppenwolf and am feeling a little better. Golden Earring is next, my radar loves. I’ll try not to fall off the wagon and wallow in the Cowboy Junkies.)

Sydney is now one of the top 5 lit festivals in the world (80,000 in attendance!?). The people there know how to do things right, plain and simple. Pride days, bookfests, decent newspapers, harbours, Asian fusion cuisine, Oceanic Flight 815, leggy models. Does it get any better than Sydney?

This year its traditional centre by the harbour at Pier 4/5 in The Rocks will add its next-door neighbour, the disused wharf Pier 2/3, to accommodate the surge that flocks annually to one of Sydney’s most spectacular successes.

Last night the festival’s artistic director, Dr Wendy Were, announced her bumper program for this year, with 40 international guests and 136 locals signed up to take part in the 335 literary events scheduled across Sydney and from the Blue Mountains to Wollongong from May 19 to 25.

“While there is no theme that guides this festival,” she said, “I feel even so that it reflects the culture of today, one in which we now seem to be looking back at where we have been, sometimes anxiously, sometimes philosophically, yet also forward, trying to envision what lies ahead.

“So I guess there is some kind of coherency underlying the choices I have made. I think there is definitely a heightened sense of personal responsibility abroad at the moment and a sense that we also have a civic responsibility and I think all this is reflected in the program.”

So I’m sitting here at me computer listening to Dusty Springfield on repeat (I just have those days) when I sees that apparently the data show the Kindle to be influencing e-book sales, if only a little. So I says to meself, “Self,” I says, “now that’s a-blogworthy.” Please kill me.

Selling through Amazon.com for $399 (£199), the Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 0.29 kg. It can hold some 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary.

The Kindle has been praised for the selection of texts available – more than 100,000 books, blogs and newspapers – and for the speed of delivery, which averages less than a minute. Fans include authors such as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis and Neil Gaiman.

Publishing is older by centuries than the music and film industries and its form of communication, the paper text, has proved far more durable than the vinyl record, eight-track tape or videocassette. New technologies, from the CD to the DVD, are usually more convenient and more effective than the ones they replace. But no ebook device has approached the practical and aesthetic appeal of the traditional book.

“Books themselves are very efficient machines, and the experience of holding a book is part of the book culture,” says Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi, who called the Kindle “flimsy” and said it reminded him of an Etch-a-Sketch toy.

Is this the end of the line for the semicolon? The intellectually-enviable French are all riled up and ready for war (don’t worry, semicolon-haters, they’ll give in eventually–they always do) and are blaming us simpleton Hanglish for the coming demise of this confusing piece of punctuation. (Disclaimer: I don’t know that I’ve written more than a handful of poems in the last ten years without at least one semicolon… I love it for its silence.)

It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations – to name no names – tend to reserve for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they’re lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one’s profession as “thinker”.

That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.

Encouragingly, a Committee for the Defence of the Semicolon appeared on the web (only to disappear some days later, which cannot be a very good sign). Articles have been written in newspapers and magazines. The topic is being earnestly discussed on the radio. It was even the subject of an April Fool’s joke on a leading internet news site, which claimed, perfectly plausibly, that President Nicolas Sarkozy had just decreed that to preserve the poor point-virgule from an untimely end, it must henceforth be used at least three times a page in all official correspondence.

Like my pappy the pipe-fitter always says, “If it doesn’t fit the first time, don’t bother remeasuring, just dforce it.” No, wait, come to think of it, he always says the opposite of that.

HarperCollins is launching a new imprint that will radically change the author/publisher relationship favouring profit sharing over advances. But it’s also trying to change the publisher bookstore relationship as well by eliminating returns. Further, everybook will also be released online and as audio. According to those who get their cheques signed by Rupert, this is part of a strategy to reimagine publishing from the ground up to control a system that’s gotten well out of hand. On first blush I have to say, and I can’t believe I’m going to, “Good” …ungh-nyah-oomph-mmmmpht… “on ya, HC, for trying.” Whew. That was as struggle.

Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are significant successes. Publishers also sometimes offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating new hits, but often those gambles do not pan out.

Ms. Friedman said the new group, which will initially publish just 25 titles a year, would offer “low or no advances.” Mr. Miller, who was most recently president of Hyperion, said he hoped to offer authors a 50-50 split of profits. Typically, authors earn royalties of 15 percent of profits after they have paid off their advances. Many authors never earn royalties.

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, a literary agent, said: “I’m not cynical about it, and I’m open to ideas, but I think it’s too soon to say what the validity of it is. These words seem fine and interesting, but how does it benefit the author and how do we find our readers?”

Under standard practices, booksellers can return unsold books, saddling publishers with the high costs of shipping and pulping copies. Mr. Miller said the publishers could share with authors any savings from eliminating returns. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment on HarperCollins’ plans.

Of course, what’s unspoken here is how the agent will be able to afford the payments on the summerhouse without a 20% cut of that fat advance. I love how everyone is hedging their bets by saying the equivalent of “we provisionally support this because it looks good on us to support change in a struggling industry, but we reserve the right to, at our discretion, remove HarperCollins’ spleen, saute it, and serve it our hungry lawyers with a side of mushy peas in vinegar and a bitter Shiraz.”

Yes, that’s really what this is. (From SFSignal)

Consider the following facts which seem ripped from a first year property law exam:

1. Sauron holds ownership in the Ring through accession, by working one thing (base metals) into a new thing (a ring of power)
2. He is dispossessed by Isildur, who now holds possession in the Ring.
3. Isildur loses the Ring (he has a manifest intent to exclude others but no physical control) when it slips off his finger as he was swimming in the Anduin river to escape from Orcs.
4. Déagol finds the Ring.
5. He is dispossessed by Sméagol (a.k.a. Gollum).
6. Gollum loses the Ring and it is finally found by Bilbo.
7. Bilbo gifts the Ring to Frodo. Later, Aragorn (the heir of Isildur) tells Frodo to carry the ring to Mordor, making Frodo his bailee.
8. Sam, assuming that Frodo is dead, takes the Ring according to instructions to help Frodo with the Ring in grave circumstances. Sam is acting here as a (fictional) bailee and he returns possession to Frodo after finding him still alive.
9. At the end of the book, Gollum restores his possession of the ring. Seconds later, he and the Ring are both destroyed. At this point all property held in the Ring disappears.

Linda Grant on the art of invention in fiction, and the place, or lack-thereof, for autobiography. Just because the character looks like, talks like, acts like me, doesn’t mean it’s me. And dear relatives, just becausse the character stole snippets of your life, doesn’t mean it’s you.

A few years back I did a reading tour of American cities for my novel When I Lived in Modern Times. In Seattle, an elderly woman intercepted me as I arrived; she wanted to talk about our shared experiences in Palestine in the 1940s, where most of the novel was set. But I wasn’t alive in the 1940s, I pointed out, smiling. She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. “You’re too young!” she cried. “You couldn’t have written that book – you weren’t there.” It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. “Then none of this happened to you?” she said. “Nothing. I made it all up. It’s fiction.” I knew that I had let her down; she had come a long way on a cold night to exchange memories of the past with one who had been there with her. Instead, she found herself confronted with a professional liar.
…
More than a decade ago, a literary editor sent me to interview the Irish novelist John McGahern, whose book The Dark was about sexual abuse. McGahern met me at the station and took me to his farmhouse in Leitrim. We sat outside on the porch before dinner and talked about writing. He discussed the function of the precise placing of the paragraph break. He described it as, “like tact, in conversation”. When I got back to London, the literary editor said, “Didn’t you ask him if he was abused?” I had finished the novel on the train to Leitrim, my heart hammering like an iron clapper against the ribs, and what the hell difference would it have made to me to know that sometime in the 40s the author had been fiddled with by his old dad? For such knowledge is the business of the peeping tom who looks through the cracks in drawn curtains at other people’s privacy.

A Guardian blogger riffs on Warhol as a serious novelist by linking him with Bret Easton Ellis.

Apparently, the two men met at a launch party for Less Than Zero in 1985. Warhol had not read Ellis’s debut, but was much taken with its title (a nod to Elvis Costello) that resonated with his own rhetoric. Cécile Guilbert zeroes in on the quasi-Zen minimalism of his interview performances. She sees Warhol as a Candide-like figure rather than the usual sub-Wildean ironist: a mystical idiot savant whose very passivity turns him into a mirror or a tape recorder. In his memoir, POPism, Warhol claimed that the words he uttered during interviews always seemed to be “coming from someplace else, someplace behind [him]“. This oracular ventriloquism raises issues of authorship, as does his approach to the novel.

Jhumpa outlines in a wide-ranging (read: not too in depth) interview with the Atlantic why she returned to short stories, what she thinks of novels, why she doesn’t review, process, some post-colonial stuff, film adaptations, and writers she likes (of the three contemporary writers she names, two are Canadian).

Is the process of writing a short story different from the process of writing a novel? Do you approach the two differently?

I don’t make a huge distinction in terms of what they require because I think an idea is either working or it isn’t. And it can work—or not—at long or short or medium length. It depends on what the story I want to tell needs. I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for The Namesake, I felt that it had to be a novel—it couldn’t work as a story. With this new book, as opposed to the first collection, I worked on many of the stories for years while they kept evolving and evolving and evolving. One difference is that in The Namesake each piece was contributing to a larger whole.

Montreal literary impresario, dead at 78.

• IMPAC shortlist announced
• Peabody Awards
• Aussie bio awards
• WO Mitchell Book Prize shortlist

Is it just a publicity stunt (or worse still “cheating”) to publish a manuscript as a “serial” novel when in reality the entire book has been already been written?

But despite writers’ heroic efforts, some critics are cynical. Mark Lawson asked Bennett if it wasn’t just a marketing ploy dreamed up by his publishers, with the story completed in advance. Indeed, this is the case with the New York Times serials. The argument is that this means greater writing (and maybe Flaubert could have got Emma Bovary’s eye colour right if he’d done the same) but it emasculates the tradition it intends to revive, depriving both writer and reader of a unique experience.

Literary nexus and publishing champion, dead at 76.

• PEN protests US banning of former drug addict in silly hat
• Rare WWII kids book acquired by Indiana Jones-like Library and Archives Canada – no word on whether poison dart booby traps or mine cart rollercoaster ride were involved
• Bloomsbury in shrill voice: HAPPY FAMILY! HAPPY FAMILY!!!
• And here I thought ALL writers in Edmonton were essentially in exile… Naw, good on ya, Alberta!
• Dr. Seuss: Stop Making Movies About My Books

• Lawrence Hill wins Writers Trust Award for Fiction! Way to go, L. Be sure to check out our interview with Hill in The Magazine, and to buy The Book of Negroes toooot sweeet.
• ‘Ninja reader Alex Boyd on shortlist for first poetry book award
• Lloyd Jones of New Zealand wins Kiriyama Prize

For its 15th anniversary, the Giller folk have boosted the prize value to $50G, with the total prize pot being $70G–making the prize something economists refer to as, “a serious bowl of salad”. The prize will now be handed out in a canvas sack with a $ painted on it. The jury was announced as well and is comprised of Margaret Atwood, Colm Toibin, and Bob Rae, who is either Canada’s Al Gore or Ralf Nader, I’m not sure which.

Don’t forget to check out the inverse omnibus review of Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, posted yesterday in The Magazine. NYT/Poetry Magazine poetry critic David Orr, Washington Post/Publisher’s Weekly book critic Marcela Valdes, and Globe and Mail/Books in Canada critic Carmine Starnino have at the fantastic novel, finally available in English.

I think you should start your Poetry Month celebrations by finally buying a copy of my new book, you big, procrastinating lug. Then once you’ve done that, check out a few poetry-related links:

Academy of American poets

Poem in Your Pocket Day

National Poetry Month

Poem-a-day

Poetry Daily

Canada’s poet laureate is John Steffler

Poem-of-the-week

Poets and Writers has a shiny new (very clean) site

Britain apparently isn’t following in the trend of having an agreed upon state-of-the-nation book. Friggin cowboys, they are. Dangerous cowboys. How irresponsible is it to go running around without a single, agreed-upon book to define your culture for the others in the world who aren’t inclined to do non-toilet-based research to find about your people?

Put it down to the lack of a national epic. Many countries have a single, agreed national text, as distinct from an oral myth—a literary classic that for centuries has celebrated its country’s founding and virtues. Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Cervantes’s Don Quixote removed a crucial pressure from their successors.

In Britain, the situation is different. There is no ancient national epic—The Faerie Queene is a gigantic and fantastical romance, Paradise Lost is only indirectly concerned with nationhood. Pope’s idea of a classicising epic of the founding of Britain, Brutus, survives as—and probably only ever consisted of—ten lines of blank verse. The Idylls of the King was probably several centuries too late to take on the role, and we are struck now by its failure to address what was evidently of burning interest to Tennyson: his age’s dynamism and technological innovation.

This lack of a national epic has set a hare running among both readers and writers. The novel of national origins has now been relegated to mass-market fiction, such as Edward Rutherfurd’s Sarum (1992). But what has occupied more elevated practitioners and critics of the art is the novel of national life in a contemporary, or near-contemporary, setting. It has come to be called the “state-of-the-nation” novel, and it is currently all around us.

Today I care so little about this it actually hurts.

The NYT asks, Why write a blog? and answers with, For the book contract. Apparently everyone’s getting rich except me.

One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.

When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.”

And two years after that?

“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,” Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.”

TV project, eh? Hm.

He’s a rough-mannered lone wolf with a poet’s soul who plays by nobody’s rules but his own, yet has, for some reason, acted as a smack-talking online shitdisturber saying the things you won’t for the amusement of others for the last five years. While his contemporaries ply their trade through a haze of shirked responsibility, artistic posturing, and drinking, he plies his through a haze of reluctantly-embraced servitude, lists of pointless book news coupled with snide remarks, and… um, drinking. By day he heads an arts and culture org that does POLICY RESEARCH; by evening he’s crawled on by PRECOCIOUS CHILDREN who correct his grammar; at night he fights CRIMES OF PASSION with words, words as deadly as sharpened shurikens. Half steely-eyed assassin, half capering trickster, all self-loathing time bomb waiting to explode, he’s…. THE BOOKNINJA.

I can see it now. As my old pals would have said after a good A-Team episode with a particularly inventive use of corrugated sheet metal: Fucken’ eh! Send cheques my way to see a pilot.

More challenges every day. Sigh. Including YA books that include the “n-word” and that paragon of artless smut …. Alice Sebold?

A long-running bestseller, “The Lovely Bones,” tells the story of a 14-year-old girl who was raped and killed by a neighbor. The book remains popular in local libraries and soon will be made into a movie.
more stories like this

But in Waltham, a local parent says the novel by Alice Sebold is too graphic. She wants it removed from the shelves of the library at the John W. McDevitt Middle School.

“I read it cover to cover. They say this book is about healing and hope, which it’s not,” said Diane Thompson, who has two daughters at the school. “The guy committing the crime doesn’t get punished. The mom runs away from her family.”

Thompson lodged a formal complaint about the book Jan. 9. A School Library Media Advisory Committee composed of librarians and faculty voted, 5 to 1, to keep the book in the McDevitt library but to move it to the faculty section and require students to get the permission of a school librarian before gaining access. Thompson said that’s not enough and is rallying other parents to ask the Waltham School Committee to remove the book from the library.

After this, she went home, emptied the pouch at the bottom of her drool bib, took her shots of thorazine and set up an appointment with her neurologist to try to discover the root of her ongoing retardation probblem.

The Times asks whether book piracy online will make authors take their ball and stay home. One can always hope.

Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.

This is the bleak forecast of the Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK and believes that the havoc caused to the music business by illegal downloading is beginning to envelop the book trade.

The sky is falling! But in case you were inclined to laugh, here’s some commentary by an author who woke up to find every page of his book scanned and online and passed off as someone else’s work.

Prose beats Prozac, says the piece. More on the medicinal benefits of reading.

For Kate, who has suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is clear: “Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there’s a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation – with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something – can be enormously helpful.”

Others say the same: “I’ve stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my medication”; and “being in a group with other women who have what I had – breast cancer – didn’t help me, but talking about books has made a huge difference”.

Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they’ve seen. There’s the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for months, then, after a reading of George Herbert’s poem The Flower (”Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have recovered greenness?”) launched into a 10-minute monologue, at the end of which he announced, “I feel great.” There’s the brain-damaged young man whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book group. And there’s the husband who is caring for his disabled wife and whose exposure to poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation. To outsiders, the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients concerned, they’re huge breakthroughs.

The search for kick-ass shelves continues

German theatre stages Satanic Verses without incident…

Canada’s oldest bookstore closes

Librarian fired for reporting patron who was viewing childporn

Orwell Prize shortlist

Million pound Dickens auction

Booker history quiz for the meaningful-employment-challenged among you

Yesterday it was reported that Amazon had decided to shaft self-published authors by insisting that if they wanted their print-on-demand books listed on the world’s biggest retail site, they’d have to use BookSurge, the Amazon-owned POD company. Today, they’re peeling back from that slimy announcement like so much polymer film pryed from a processed cheese slice. Here’s their official corporate line, which may or may not give you eye herpes from its dangerous levels of the radioactive element spindoction.

One question that we’ve seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?

Yes. Modern POD printing machines can print and bind a book in less than two hours. If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers — including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we’re holding in inventory — a common case — we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we’d have to wait for it to be transhipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.

Speed of shipping is a key customer experience focus for us and it has been for many years. Amazon Prime is an example of a successful and growing program that is driving up our speed of shipment with customers. POD items printed inside our own fulfillment centers can make our Amazon Prime cutoff times. POD items printed outside cannot.

Simply put, we can provide a better, more timely customer experience if the POD titles are printed inside our own fulfillment centers.

Obviously this message was truncated before they got to the padding-the-coffers-through-corporate-monopoly part of their sloppily written confession.