Zombie Haiku. I just couldn’t wait until tomorrow.

Sharing your name with another author sucks, but what happens when readers can’t tell you apart? A couple friends of mine have this problem and it only really sucks if the other author is bigger than you in terms of reputation and sales. But I wonder if you occasionally sell a book by mistake to some hapless schmoe who doesn’t know any better. That’s almost better than a pity sale.

So, I decided to take a lofty view of the new David Jenkins. Or I pretended to: actually, the frequency of being asked, “Is it you who writes that stuff for Time Out?” was beginning to grate. And then came the remake of Flight of the Red Balloon. The 1961 original was itself a byword for nauseating sentimentality but it was at least well made. This year’s version wasn’t just pass-the-sickbag-Alice twee, it was also abysmal. And David Jenkins liked it. Loved it. Raved about it.

I had to do something. I’d already tried to mess with his mind a little by writing a piece on mumbling in the movies for G2, wondering how he’d feel when he saw a piece about film, under his name, that he hadn’t written. Would he pale? Think he’d turned to automatic writing, in his sleep? Start worrying about his alcohol consumption? He’d be forgetting his own name next. Then I started publishing pieces about my drug-addled days on the hippy trail; let’s see how he’d like to be thought of as a 60-year-old man in a young man’s body.

It wasn’t enough. So I phoned Tony Elliott, who owns Time Out and whom I’ve known for a long time. What was this David Jenkins like, I asked. Tony emailed me a photo of my doppelganger: fresh-faced, trusting, kind – clearly not me. But I’d scratched the itch; I had to know more. I had to meet him. So I phoned Time Out and I got his voicemail and it said, “This is David Jenkins,” and I said, “This is David Jenkins,” and he called back, and we made a date.

For the longest time after my third book came out, I had the distinctly surreal experience of having the title mis-listed on all the e-commerce sites as “The Hunger” by Russell Murray instead of “The Hunter” by George Murray. The cover image still had the right name and title, crystal clear, but somehow the lever monkeys in charge of the databases got it wrong. I couldn’t forward anyone to the Amazon pages without a lengthy explanation. It was disspiriting. There are several other George Murray’s with internet profiles of some scope, most notably a wheelchair athlete, David Bowie’s bass player, and some old Scottish dude who is responsible for Steven Heighton always calling me Lord George, but, luckily, there are no other George Murray authors I know of.

Salman Rushdie writes on the genesis of Midnight’s Children.

“Midnight’s Children” took an unusually long time to be published because of a series of unfortunate events. Cape and Knopf had agreed to print jointly in the U.S. to save money, and then a printers strike began. When that ended and the book was finally printed, a transport strike meant that copies could not be shipped to London. When the copies finally arrived, a dockworkers strike meant that they could not be unloaded. And so the publication date slipped and slipped, and I chewed my fingernails.

Publishers are now putting chicklit covers on all books written by women, regardless of whether it actually fits the genre? Lo! On the horizon! A pale horse commeth!

When we look at a book, its cover tells us what to expect. A pink paperback featuring a smiling young woman is most likely a female-centric summer read, whereas a gun on a black background is probably a murder story. A few simple aesthetic rules narrow our options, make life easier and ensure none of us has to wander Waterstone’s for hours, wailing in confusion. And yet the rules seem to be changing.

Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not.

Ann Prachett in The Atlantic on the trials of touring a book.

Sometimes two or three or five people were there, sometimes they all worked in the bookstore, but very often, in the cities where I had no relatives to drum up a little crowd, I was on my own. I did freelance writing for Bridal Guide in those days, and more often than not there was a girl working at the store who was engaged. We would sit and talk about her bridesmaids’ dresses and floral arrangements until my time was up; then she would ask me to sign five copies of stock. This, I was told, was a coup because signed copies cannot be returned to the publisher, so it was virtually the same as a sale. (Please note: this is not true. I have pulled seemingly brand-new copies of my novels from sealed cartons and found my signature in them. Somebody mailed those copies back.) But none of that mattered, because my publicist told me that the success of book tour wasn’t measured in how many books you sold that night. What mattered was being friendly, so that the girl at the cash register, and maybe even the store manager, would like you, and in liking you would read your book once you had gone, and in reading your book would see how good it was and then work to hand-sell it to people for months or even years to come. And I believed this because if I didn’t, I had no idea what the hell I was doing out there. After saying all my warm goodbyes, I would leave the store in the dark, drive the two blocks back to the McDonald’s to change out of my dress, and put in a couple of hours on the road to Indianapolis, where I was scheduled to appear the next night at seven. I was exhausted and embarrassed, and yet I told myself the experience had been worthwhile because I was friendly and would be remembered for that.
…
All this raises the question: Why don’t I just stay home? Believe me, I’ve asked myself that many times, mostly in dark hotel rooms when the alarm goes off at 4:30 in the morning because I have a flight to catch. Partly because touring is in my contract. Selling is part of the job.

Orwell’s diaries in blog form

Esquire to release e-paper cover

Top 10 graphic novels

Is Henry James unadaptable? (Does this have something to do with literary Darwinism?)

Alphabet made of dead Halo characters

10 most expensive books about BC (happy birthday, BC)

Small press profile in UK: Shire Books

If “fucking” is the adjective, what’s the adverb? (Thanks, P)

Following the Yankees’ 13-4 loss Monday, starting pitcher Mike Mussina informed reporters that his latest submission to McSweeney’s, a niche literary journal and humor website founded by Dave Eggers, had been rejected.

The last line is pure genius.

“Outsider” poet Laureate profiled and assessed at Slate. (Thanks, Amaka)

In a sense, Ryan is an American pragmatist, making her more like Robert Frost (about whom she’s written enthusiastically) than Dickinson. Hers is a parsing imagination, given to trying to differentiate between the real and the imagined, the real and the taken-for-granted. In “Carrying a Ladder,” she writes “We are always/ really carrying/ a ladder, but it’s/ invisible. We/ only know/ something’s/ the matter:/ something precious/ crashes; easy doors/ prove impassable.” While her work has deepened over the years—The Niagara River is her strongest book—she has always been most interested in the idea that “whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.” Many of the poems end on a note of deflation, pointing up the traps our expectations set for us.

Jesus at the 40, the 30, the 20! Stiff arms Confusius and pivots around the big centre Buddha, steps on the face of L Ron Hubbard and makes for the end zone! A flag is down on Hinduism for having too many players on the field, but the play continues and it’s all Jesus now, with Mohammad hot on his heels, but here’s Moses and Abraham running interference, and it’s JESUS WITH THE TOUCHDOWN! Oh my! The fans and Baha’i cheerleaders go nuts! That’s classic football right there, people! Now the robes get hiked and here comes the victory dance! Crank dat soulja boy! Woo! Showmanship!

The book, “The Winners Manual,” is a guide to applying lessons learned in football to everyday life, written by Jim Tressel, lease of autobiographies by Deanna Favre, the wife of Brett Favre, the Green Bay Packers quarterback, and by Tony Dungy, the Indianapolis Colts head coach — both of which also became best sellers.

“Tyndale isn’t seeking to publish every football book that comes along,” said Jan Long Harris, an associate publisher at Tyndale who acquired Mr. Dungy’s book. “But it partly reflects that once you do a successful book in one category, others will follow. And I think all three of these books were remarkable stories.”

For years Christian publishers have stormed into traditionally secular territory, publishing crime fiction, self-help, drama, young-adult literature and Spanish-language romance novels.

This article on literary Darwinism will change the way you think aboutzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… ssznnnnzzzzznnzzzzktzzzzzMurf zzzzzzzzzzzzNonoafteryouLisaLoebthewater’sfinezzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzNoreallyIagreeCarrieMosszzzzPVCoverleatheranyday ..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… zzzzzzzzGuinnesspleasezzzzzzzzzzzz SNORTKzzcough… aheam… and save the field of literary criticism once and for all.

In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a “good poem” and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: “What if criticism is a science as well as an art?” And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and psychoanalytic theory.

But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, “he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy’s novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged.”

Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe’s Ideas page, where Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why the approach is for him, as he says, “the way and the light.”

Reader CFG points out this gem: Giles Coren takes on the Sunday Times sub editors who fucked up his copy. The editors respond here, biting back with the deadly t-shirt offensive.

I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that fucked up my review on saturday.

It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”

It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best”.

Normally, I couldn’t give a shit about a few words in a newspaper review, so long as meaning isn’t changed. But I once wrote a piece on assignment for a major paper that shall remain nameless. It was a very personal essay about my experiences on 9/11 and the wording and content of it was extremely important to me. I told the editors directly that it wasn’t to be changed without my consent. They tried numerous times to wriggle the essay away from riffing on the responsibility of art in times of tragedy (how the whole idea was sold to me in the first place) and concentrate purely on the prurient details of the morning’s disaster, and I kept resisting these changes and threatening to pull the whole thing off the table. Anyway, after assurances upon assurances that we’d reached an agreement, someone went ahead and cut the fucking thing up anyway. At the time, it felt like a major betrayal that merited the printing of an abusive t-shirt. I’ve calmed since then.

“The bad boy of American poetry“? I think more like the bad-boy-next-door. I find him kind of charming.

Kleinzahler considers himself an outsider, compelled to stir up trouble. He has labored largely in obscurity — more popular in London than in New York. And though as a rule he stubbornly avoids the poetry establishment, he surfaces now and then with a bone to pick.

In literary journals, he takes poets and critics to task for what he perceives as their slights and shoddy work. A few years ago, he even skewered Garrison Keillor’s radio poetry readings.

So what if he’s unpopular? It keeps his name in play. “I make my living off these stooges,” he says.

Anyway, his work speaks for itself. Even the polite academy he so often lampoons lauded his 12th poetry collection, “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” published this year.

That, it turns out, bothers Kleinzahler too. He wonders why the attention was so long in coming. His response to the literary world: Go to hell.

BC has new legislation to force English teachers to meet certain Canadian content quota. This is a good thing? On one hand, a single Canadian book a year isn’t a lot to ask, but on the other there’s, um, the entire world and history of literature—-in which Canada plays only the tiniest part. While I myself might choose certain Canlit books for a English survey course, I don’t know if I believe in legislating it. The reasoning behind this, at least in the context of this article, smacks more of concern for domestic sales than the education of our children.

It won’t just be teenagers reading Canadian literature this fall when a new curriculum requires B.C. high school English teachers to assign at least one Canadian book per year, says the new chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

Wayne Grady, a much-published nature writer who lives near Kingston, Ont., says that when a book lands on a course reading list, “it stays in print longer, and so it’ll be available in bookstores longer. There are all kinds of spinoff effects.”

The 1,600-member writers’ union rallied behind Vancouver’s Jean Baird when she lobbied B.C.’s education ministry to make Canadian books a mandatory part of the English language arts curriculum in Grades 8 to 12. (The Sun reported on the success of her effort July 5.)

Grady notes that this was a battle Canadian authors fought in the 1970s, so when Baird started drumming up support for her campaign, the first reaction of Writers’ Union members was, Do we still have to do this?

“Apparently, we do,” Grady says, and Baird “did a great job.”

The Booker longlist, announced yesterday and packed full of relatively unknown names, has raised eyebrows—-some in pleasant surprise, some in veiled disbelief. Colonies with nominees on the list obviously play to that angle, while colonies without (ahem) are carrying rather terse wire stories I won’t bother posting here.

• Guardian (general coverage)
• Independent (starts with who’s been left off the list)
• Guardian (first time novelists)
• BBC (Rushdie as favourite)
• Guardian (Sutherland skeptical of longlists)
• Irish Times (from the Emerald angle)
• Australian (the angle from below)

Sick Ninja baby, sick lady ninja, and now sick me. Taking a day off, but thought you should see the Booker Long List. One of these names seems a little bigger than the others…

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

From A to X by John Berger

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Canadian mystery novelist Howard Engel interviewed at NPR about the stroke that left him able to write, but not read what he’d just written. My old friend Don Summerhayes helped him edit this book by meeting him regularly to read back aloud what Engel had written the night before. Just imagine.

The NYT offers a short, insouciant essay on the myriad ways authors make money, most of which have nothing to do with writing. Public speaking, courses, tours, product placements, opening for Jethro Tull, etc.

In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. And some best-selling authors charge double that.

The venues can range from the upstanding (libraries, churches) to the downright weird. “Once, back in the ’80s, I spoke at a ‘motion upholstery conference’ in North Carolina,” the author Roy Blount Jr. said in an e-mail message. “Motion upholstery,” he explained, means “chairs that tilt back or vibrate or turn into beds.” He learned something at the conference: “Just as fish can’t see anything funny about water, people in the motion upholstery field don’t respond to jokes, however inspired, about motion upholstery.” Blount said speaking fees helped put his children through college. “Then I drifted away from it,” he said. “Now I’m doing it again; the money is a comfort in my golden years.”

For the record, my speaking contract has a rider that includes six local beers, cheese and a box of those freaking addictive Vinta crackers.  Who am I kidding? That’s not the rider, that’s the fee.

Aussie publishers step up fight against imports

Ontario funds Shakespeare Universe…

American self-help big in Brazil

Sony opens e-reader formats to allow for non-Sony books… you’re getting warmer, doc!

Several factors are lining up to make it a boom time for libraries in Canada. I was really hoping this would be about new dress code regulations for hot librarians, but it’s not. Bring back the tight hair buns and revealing chenille sweaters!! (The demise of literary snobbery? Haven’t you been reading?)

With the high cost of books and the demise of literary snobbery, readership is on the rise, write Shannon Proudfoot and Cassandra Drudi.

Business is booming at Canada’s major public libraries, which credit everything from the high price of buying books to social networking, a new social acceptance for frothy best-sellers and the Internet for the increase in use.

Toronto boasts the busiest public library system per capita in the world, with 1.2 million cardholders and 28.9 million items in 40 languages circulating each year. In Regina, 3,180 people are on the waiting list for Fearless Fourteen, the newest offering from romance-turned-crime writer Janet Evanovich. Halifax public libraries have 240 readers on a waiting list for Kathy Reichs’ newest forensic mystery, which won’t even be published until the end of the summer. And in Ottawa, 667 people are waiting to get their hands on one of 77 copies of Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me?

“Everyone thinks the Internet has been the death of the public libraries and exactly the opposite is true,” says Grant Kaiser, director of marketing and development for Calgary Public Library. “We see more and more and more readership every year.”

Michael Chabon interviewed at the LAT about genre.

Where did this bias against work created for a popular audience come from?

In all fairness, it came from the fact that the vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is crap. It’s impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned crap. The proportion may settle down in the neighborhood of 90/10 — Sturgeon’s Law said that 90% of everything is crud.

Dudes, who could blame it if it couldn’t? I’m baffled by the technology behind crosswalk signals these days. And have I told you about my iPod? It’s, like, totally boggling the things it can do. The other day I cooked an omelette on it and the cappuccino was served with one of those little florette designs in the foam. Of course, it doesn’t work now, but I still cooked an omelette on it. Now, imagine if it had had a phone and GPS in it?! I’d have known exactly where I was the moment I scalded off my ear.

Comic-Con took a break from media frenzy to have a thoughtful moment with a panel featuring some of the most interesting contemporary science fiction writers in print right now: Robert J. Sawyer (Rollback), Ann Aguirre (Grimspace), Tobias S. Buckell (Ragamuffin), Alan Dean Foster (author of more than 100 books), Charles Stross (Saturn’s Children), and John Zakour (Dangerous Dames). Moderator Maryelizabeth Hart, from Mysterious Galaxy, did a great job steering the table packed with writers into interesting discussions about whether scifi can keep up with scientific and social changes — and changes they predict we’ll see in the future.

The NYT questions whether the internet is harming or helping the literacy of teens. The graphic is hysterical, in part because it’s exactly the opposite in my house. While the vast majority of what I do on the internet is reading, with the occasional foray into video clips and the odd video game, what’s really at stake is WHAT I’m reading. If I run out of book news, science articles, and current affairs at the newspapers I love, I am in danger of sliding down down down that slippery slope into prurient celebrity schadenfreude. Is it still reading if the article is illustrated with a shot of Britney’s crotch?

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.

Following John Sutherland’s breathless panting for ebooks last week, comes a point-and-counterpoint-style pair of articles in the Guardian. Naomi Alderman says we’re witnessing the birth of a new art form, while Peter Conrad found himself alienated from books he’s long loved. I’m somewhere in between on this. I believe we’re witnessing the birth of a new form of alienation.

As ebook readers become more affordable, publishers will produce electronic versions of books with the usual notes and introductions and the prices of both the devices and the books will come down. And that’s only the beginning. What’s most exciting about ebooks is not what they can do at the moment but what they may do in the future. The iLiad can connect to the internet: imagine reading Middlemarch and, at a touch of a button, being able to look at images of the same paintings and sculptures Dorothea looks at in Rome or, for academics, being able to see links to all articles which reference the passage you’re reading.

Works written specially for the ebook reader are an even more exciting prospect. A piece of ‘ebook native’ fiction may allow you to hear the birdsong while reading a romantic outdoor scene, or may automatically subscribe you to a fictional newspaper mentioned in a crime thriller. Some will consider such things gimmicky and a threat to ‘proper’ reading, but different kinds of text can co-exist. Audiobooks haven’t killed the printed word, television hasn’t killed radio. What we’re seeing isn’t the death of the book, but the creation of a new art form.

A little Friday afternoon work reminder that YOU’RE HERE FOREVER! Have a great weekend.

A bravely worded e-mail written by graphic designer Brent Quigley decrying his advertising firm’s “complete lack of managerial competence” and its “utter failure to treat employees with respect” has remained inside the drafts folder since it was first composed on Dec. 4, 2007.

“I’m going to send it soon—if not this week, definitely the next,” said Quigley, who often opens the e-mail, corrects spelling and syntax errors, and saves the changes before relegating the fearless letter back to his drafts folder. “Actually, maybe I’ll wait until the end of summer, since that’s always a busy time around here. Also, after Labor Day would probably be best. I’ll definitely send it off by October, though.”

Between crashes and legacy file formats, there’s a whole host of reasons to be afraid of digital storage. Now imagine you’re the world’s librarians dealing with the only remaining copies of some major texts. Don’t trip over that plug. How do you preserve digital texts for future technologies that haven’t been invented yet?

“The state of things is that we’re in the digital dark ages right now,” Witt said. “We’re losing a ton of valuable information that is electronic because of the transient nature of the Internet and of storage technology and how people use it.”

Tom Cramer, the associate director of digital library systems and services at Stanford University, said that NASA’s inadvertent discovery — that even machine-produced data can be lost to the environment or obsolescence — echoes his own experience. Closer to home, Stanford’s library was tasked with helping the Monterey Jazz Festival preserve its historical recordings from decades ago. Out of hundreds of tapes taken from nearly 40 years of recording history, Cramer said, only one couldn’t be recovered. But audio from a digital format the festival began using in the 1990s wasn’t as reliable: out of scores of those tapes, covering about six years, six were damaged beyond recovery.

So digital preservation encompasses not only the problem of reliable storage and recovery but of how to finance it, how to manage it and how to make such systems sustainable over the long run. For that to happen, though, enough institutions have to participate. The British report, “Mind the Gap,” found that although a slight majority of respondents in the United Kingdom said they had an institutional commitment to addressing the issue, only 20 percent said there was enough funding to tackle it, a third said there were “clear responsibilities” for handling it, and only 18 percent said there was a strategy for digital preservation at all.

Still, Stanford has been one of the pioneers in developing solutions to digital preservation, especially through its Silicon Valley ties to Sun Microsystems, which last year set up the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, or PASIG, to bring together leaders in research libraries, universities and the government to periodically meet and collaborate on digital archiving issues.

I was also under the impression that data lost integrity every time it was copied, so that every time a file is moved from one storage space to another, it’s slowly disintegrating. I remember reading something about that long ago. Is that still the case? Do any of my shadowy IT minions know about this? Oh, and people: please pants anyone you hear use the term “cybrarian” in conversation. End communication.

There’s no denying it, as much as I take extreme pleasure in making fun of the Danielle Steels and Jackie Collinseseses of the world, nothing I or anyone else says can touch them. Sales-wise, they’re gods existing on another plane from us mere literary humans, and that may be the deciding vote after all.

While it’s hard to generalize, Steel’s books are usually populated by smart, attractive heroines juggling work, love and family. About one in five are historical, set in, say, pre-World War II Europe or the Russian Revolution. Some tackle larger issues, such as homelessness in “Safe Harbour,” domestic violence in “Journey,” infertility in “Mixed Blessings” and even cloning in “The Klone and I.”

“I think the one recurring theme that I didn’t used to be aware of is that I try to give people hope,” she says. “I think that’s so important. Love is wonderful, but hope is more important. Without hope you can’t live.”

Critics haven’t always appreciated the effort, often recoiling from her shallower characters, brand-name dropping and the sugary aftertaste her books leave behind.

No matter — the woman is critic-proof, a Teflon one-woman publishing phenomenon. Steel is a leader of a genre that generated $1.37 billion in book sales in 2006, outselling every market category except religion/inspirational, according to the Romance Writers of America.

How does Steel handle critics? “It’s very simple. I haven’t read them in years,” she says. “My feelings get very hurt when people say mean things about me. The trouble I find is that they don’t just criticize the book — they then get nasty personally. And so I stopped reading them.”

Somebody wrote, “While it’s hard to generalize…” in an article about Danielle Steel and didn’t follow it with a  “(present company excepted)” paranthetical subclause? I just hate to see these things go to waste. That’s like an overview of the Bush presidency beginning, “All’s fair in love and war…” and not following through with “(president’s companies excepted)”.

They’ve launched the Sony e-reader in the UK, and John Sutherland takes a look and finds the whole area of e-reading to be the second coming of Gutenchrist.

What the e-reader means – in the not too distant future – is as much of a cultural explosion as the “rather unusual manuscript” brought with it in the 15th century. It’s not a storage device but a portal, a Lewisian wardrobe, opening into new worlds. New possibilities in linkage and illustration will supplement facsimile type. In a few years, you’ll be able to hear the author’s voice – should you so wish – or switch between script and oral versions, full-text or abbreviated text, or digest. You’ll be able to “dialogue” the book, or its maker. Soundtracks will be as possible, and as enriching, as they are with movies. Media mix will create new realms of literary artistry. Perhaps even smells. And, of course, it will be damned useful for the briefcase-carrying Quests of the world. In 20 years, we won’t know how we lived without the thing.

Stuart Jeffries wonders why Britain spends more on retail books than any other European country, yet stats show an inordinate number of people aren’t reading. The answer seems quite simple to me: JK Rowling is buying and hording books in a solid gold cave furnished with cinder block shelves that use midlist novelists as plywood planks. Since the release of the Forbes list, I also suspect that she’s carpeted the place with the cured skins of several Dan Browns (Dans Brown?).

There is a thing called reader’s block. It is not the same as writer’s block. In fact, reader’s block is a phenomenon partly explained as a reader’s all-too-understandable response to so many writers not having writer’s block. It is often said that everybody has a novel in them. The current problem is that so many of us bring that novel out of ourselves and get it published. It would help cure reader’s block if lots of people resolved not to. But that is not what is happening. Instead, we are made so anxious by the accelerating onrush of books, especially novels, that we say: “Enough! I can’t – I won’t – read the winner of the Orange prize, whatever Mariella Frostrup says.”

But not, unfortunately, before we have bought a copy of said book and put it on our groaning in-pile. Spending on books in Britain was £4.4bn last year, a rise of 4.5% on 2006, which industry watchers suggest is probably a faster increase than anywhere else in Europe. Admittedly, that is partly because books cost more in Britain than they do anywhere else in Europe, but let’s not spoil the story. Book sales are forecast to continue rising: according to analysts Research and Markets, the value of retail book sales in the UK will rise by 13.6% between 2008 and 2012. What is worrying is that, despite the rise in expenditure on books, the number of hours spent reading books is declining and the proportion of Britons who prefer examining the fluff in their belly button to spending face time with anything from Thomas Pynchon’s oeuvre is growing, possibly exponentially.

Just as it will break us all down eventually. Actually, it’s less grim than that. It’s pop mag Time parsing the position for the people. See that? Alliteration. That’s a poetry thingy. Look it up. Glad to see excellent poet/editor/’Ninja-friend Zapruder quoted here.

The current laureate, Charles Simic, says he was often too busy to talk to his cat. He kept expecting the rush to die down, but it never did. “It’s endless interviews,” he says. “The position is so well known that sooner or later every newspaper and magazine in the country gets in touch with you.”

And then there’s the correspondence: dozens of emails a day from verse-challenged citizens who aren’t afraid to go straight to the top. “Requests from schoolteachers asking you to give advice to students on how to read literature,” Simic says. “Or from a business association in Topeka asking you to read a poem at the opening of a convention. My cell phone would ring and a high government official would ask me to fix a poem written by her late father to read at his memorial service. Sometimes I wanted to go just to see who these people were, but you can’t do everything.”
…
Although Ryan hasn’t decided what her project will be, she agrees with those who feel that poetry’s “uselessness” is precisely what makes it cool. As Matthew Zapruder, a poet and an editor at Wave Press, observes, “The idea that you write poetry your whole life and then suddenly in a very public way have to start thinking about how to make it ‘useful’ for the nation is pretty terrifying. In a culture like ours where language has been completely and utterly subordinated to the task of selling people things, how do you create a little freedom? Only in art that isn’t designed to sell or convince or sermonize or cajole or urge. Maybe that’s poetry, or at least some poetry.”

The current king of Canadian letters, Lawrence Hill, meets the current queen of England. It does my heart good to know that Larry is talking to people with power. I feel like he’ll convert them all to sense and send them back out into the world to do good.

Hill, whose meeting was scheduled after he won the literary prize this spring, described his 15-minute audience with the Queen as “great, actually.”

“She was much more conversational and relaxed than I had imagined that she would be, so I was able to enjoy myself and feel I was speaking to not just a queen but an ordinary person in conversation,” said the Burlington, Ont.-based writer, whose credits also include Any Known Blood and Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.

“Most of the conversation had to do with the historical questions the book explores, and she was really quite struck [by the story].”

Just a while ago I read in Ted Hughes’ letters that he had a similar experience—-was dreading meeting an old wind bag and came away absolutely charmed by the woman. Nice to know she’s still got it.

Imagine a publisher comes across the memoir of one of their most famous dead authors and decides the contents might be damaging enough to the artist’s name and work that they burn it rather than publish it to save the poor soul from himself. Such was the case with John Murray and Lord Byron. This excerpt from a book on Murray looks at how things worked in a, for better or worse, different day for publishing.

Byron died in Greece, where he had gone to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire and left unpublished memoirs. What followed was quite extraordinary. Murray and a close friend of Byron, John Cam Hobhouse, decided the memoirs must be destroyed. Better not to revive memories of the scandalous episodes in Byron’s life that had driven the poet into exile.

The memoirs would damage the poet’s reputation of which both men were jealous guardians, and would distress his estranged wife, Annabella, and his half-sister Augusta, who had also been his lover. So the manuscript was burnt in the drawing-room of the Murray house, 50 Albemarle Street, Mayfair.

This was all the more bizarre because neither Murray nor Hobhouse had actually read the memoirs. Hobhouse feared they would reveal Byron’s bisexuality. He knew about this because he had been Byron’s companion on his first visit to Greece, and had later had letters from him recounting his conquests.

Murray knew nothing of this side of the poet’s life. Even 100 years later it came as a surprise to John Murray IV when Harold Nicolson pointed out in 1923 that Byron’s last love poem had been addressed to a Greek boy called Loukas.

Even so, the decision to burn the memoirs remains as strange as it was reprehensible. It would surely have been possible to publish an expurgated version, or to set the manuscript aside for publication at a later date when all immediately concerned were dead.

Indeed later generations of Murrays hoped that this had been done. John Murray VII remembered that his father, Jock Murray, was sure the manuscript was somewhere in the Albemarle Street building.

“Every time we had workmen in doing alterations he would be peering behind panels and under floorboards, still hoping it would turn up,” he recalled.

Amazon is looking for a bigger slice of the pie and is ready to bust a cap in the ass of anyone who gets in their way. Big publisher vs. big retailer. It’s like watching two people you dislike have a fist fight. But despite that, excuse me while I go cancel my pending Amazon orders.

A price war is raging between a powerful online bookseller and a leading publisher, with authors caught in the crossfire and losing vital royalties.

Amazon is in conflict with the Hachette Group, Britain’s largest publisher, over terms and discounts and is refusing to sell its titles.

The online bookseller has imposed extraordinary sanctions against the publisher, whose authors include the bestselling writers Stephen King and James Patterson. It is listing Hachette books but preventing the public from purchasing them by removing the “buy new” button from its websites. Titles such as the hardback of King’s Duma Key and Patterson’s The 6th Target have been affected with only “used” copies being offered for sale.

Amazon already buys its books from publishers at half the cover price and is seeking even larger discounts.

Could this spell the end for chicklit? Listen, if there’s one thing I’ve learned lo these last 10 years, it’s that staring menacingly like Drew Barrymore in Firestarter (or drooling and convulsing like that kid who played Danny Lloyd in The Shining) and desperately willing things and people to pop out of existence or burst into flames just doesn’t work. So my suspicion is that no, despite giving myself a pinprick anneurysm trying, chicklit won’t spontaneously combust this year.

There is no question that certain brands, like certain summer resorts, have a talismanic effect. And if you can weave a romantic comedy around the Chanels and Sub-Zeroes, as Ms. Green has done — with the sentimental addition of a chic old coot named Nan presiding over a rundown beach house — you might have a best seller.

But this summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well. Is that all there is? Has the fashion plot thinned to such a degree that it’s just about presenting life as a blue velvet ring box or a giant Birkin bag?

A sassy detective duo or two great writers? Or are they so great?

In the photograph on the dust jacket of Neil Powell’s Amis & Son, the two of them (whose first names are used throughout, there being no other convenient way of writing about them together) are seated on a sofa under a marble fireplace. Kingsley is giving Martin a fond, fatherly look, very mildly suggesting exasperation with a 1960s teenage son. The father wears modish, brightly polished shoes, a dark shirt with a buttoned-down collar, a tie; such was casual dress, before casual dress abandoned any semblance of correctness to become gratuitously sloppy. Martin, glancing neutrally at his parent, looks like a Mod, in a dark suit and white shirt, a tie likewise – though it’s a thinner example – and what appears to be smart suede footwear.

This posed picture nicely stresses the affinity between famous father and emerging prodigy, but captures as well the absorbing contrast which Powell draws between the two generations, in a volume which is not really a comprehensive “critical biography” of both – Zachary Leader’s Life of Kingsley alone is longer – and yet is much more. Amis & Son (the ampersand, neatly hinting at the “family firm”, as Martin once referred to it, is a good touch) is also about parenthood in the modern British intelligentsia and the huge cultural shift between the 1940s and the 60s, and an analysis of the way in which a celebrated father and son, each producing comic and satiric fiction, could come up with such “disparate results”. It develops into a judicious evaluation of all this by Powell, a poet and critic of almost exactly Martin Amis’s age, who believes with Kingsley (or his character Tristram Hallett in The Russian Girl, 1992) that the question to ask about literature is not “Is it new?”, or even “What does it mean?” or “Is it art?”, but “Is it any good?”.

• Rowling the richest celebrity according to Forbes
• Montreal writer up for Man Asian Prize
• Ask Haruki anything
• Critic finds crime pays (last item)

How much does George Wubblewoo Bush love the word “awesome”? Awesome.

On Memorial Day, President Bush paid tribute to the troops and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the men and women buried there, President Bush declared, “They’re an awesome bunch of people, and the United States is blessed to have such citizens.”

What else is awesome? Just about everything. “Thank you, Your Holiness,” the president publicly said to Pope Benedict XVI in mid-April when he became only the second pope in history to visit the White House. “Awesome speech.”

Not that it wasn’t, but really. Awesome speech, Mr. Pope? It’s one thing to hear Ellen Page, the young and radiant star of “Juno,” saying, as she did in a December New York Times piece: “I always want to dress up like an animal or something really obscure, like a carrot or a wrench. That would be awesome.” But it’s quite another to hear the president of the United States use the word. With the freaking pope.

Sam Jordison, who, contrary to recent press clippings, I agree with most of the time, takes on Robert Heinlein’s controversial Starship Troopers.

The controversy has been raging (and I mean raging) ever since the book was first published almost 50 years ago, helped along by its prominent position on US marine recommended reading lists and Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously over the top 1997 adaptation. Even if large swathes of middle America are supposed to have taken this film at face value and viewed it as a special effects-heavy exercise in battle-porn, its satirical intent couldn’t be clearer. As Verhoeven says on his (highly recommended) DVD commentary track, the point is that the men in long black coats are “bad, bad, bad”. But, splendid as the film may be, it shouldn’t be taken as a true reflection of the book. Heinlein’s position is far more complex, even if no less bonkers for that.

But, as exciting as it is to see a critic move between Midnight’s Children and Starship Troopers with such ease, and as much as I liked ST as a kid, I have to ask: why does it seem like such a schlock novel compared to the best SF has to offer? And speaking of which, the most compelling line of this entire article is the last one: “Next time: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr” w00t!!

An unrepentant old dame who’s the spit of my ex-girlfriend’s mum has written a memoir about defrauding the literary community by forging letters from the likes of Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker. Apparently she’s telling the truth about lying, though. Brassy, fun and yet somehow somehow so pathetic.

When Ms. Israel first brought her book to Simon & Schuster, it was in the middle of “Memoirgate,” as she called it, when the publishing industry was on high alert for the next James Frey.

“Memoirgate, as interesting as it was and as much anxiety as it caused me,” Ms. Israel said in a telephone interview, “apparently did not cause them enough anxiety.”

Hers is not a memoir in the style of Margaret Seltzer, whose account, as Margaret B. Jones, of gang life in South-Central Los Angeles turned out to be completely bogus; or Mr. Frey, whose books “A Million Little Pieces” and “My Friend Leonard” contained exaggerated and fabricated details about his drug addiction and recovery.

“Their memoirs were fraudulent, and my memoir is not fraudulent,” said Ms. Israel, who gave her age as “somewhere in my 60s.” “But I did fraudulent things.”

The Writers’ Trust Awards just got sexier. Thousands of dollars sexier, in all. And we all know that cashola is the prime measurement unit for sexy. The new Notable Author award does away with gender categories (Tim Findley and Marian Engle awards) for mid-career authors and merges them into a single awesome writer prize. (Thanks, FtC)

“How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s“.

You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I’m completely blotto by 10 a.m. because of a deep, withering fear that my family will eventually discover my bisexuality. And, to top it all off, we were both born in Wollaston, Massachusetts, if you can believe it! But just because he’s one of history’s finest short story writers, Cheever’s epic benders are considered delightful, whereas I’ve just got a “serious problem with alcohol.”

What a bunch of horseshit.

This profile piece on Augusten Burroughs in the SMH raises some interesting questions: in the post Frey/Albert/et al world, do memoirs of severe suffering and abuse start out guilty and remain under suspicion until proven innocent?

In Burroughs’s telling, it is as if what he sees as his father’s inner monstrousness manifested itself outwardly.

Burroughs says this true self was so carefully hidden behind a public mask that no one outside the family ever glimpsed it.

Robison’s friends and colleagues saw him quite differently. He was the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts before he died aged 70 in 2005. People who knew him there say that before his divorce from Margaret, he drank heavily and nearly had a breakdown, but they say he always remained the quintessential Southern gentleman and was happily remarried for more than 25 years.

Gary Matthews, a philosophy professor, describes Robison as “an almost motherly figure who looked after everyone in the department and was very kind”, while Fred Feldman, another philosophy professor who first met Robison in 1969, says: “I had tremendous respect and affection for him. He was a wonderful guy, a very generous, thoughtful and gentle man.” They also say Robison bragged about both his sons.

Such sharply contrasting views are sure to renew questions about the truthfulness of memoirs in general and Burroughs’s in particular. Children of the psychiatrist with whom Burroughs was left in Running With Scissors filed a lawsuit over inaccuracies. It was settled in August 2007 by changing some language on the acknowledgments page, a financial settlement of an undisclosed amount and an agreement to call the work a “book” instead of a “memoir” in the author’s note.

There’s been some buzz and hand-wringing about this for a while, but it looks like the LA Times book section is next up on the chopping block. Weep, ye stressed publicists. And bring us your tired and huddled masses.

According to a former staffer, the Los Angeles Times is folding its standalone Sunday book review section, laying off two dedicated book editors. The last standalone section will be the July 27 one. Steve Wasserman, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, sent out an e-mail Monday morning, protesting the changes at the embattled Tribune-owned daily.

Nancy Sullivan, executive director of corporate communications at the paper, would not comment on staff cuts at the paper or that the book review coverage will be placed in the Calendar section of the paper where it will share space with features. She did say that more definitive news would be issued next week and added that the paper “remains committed to book review coverage. What form that takes is what’s under evaluation.”

A bunch of, I’m assured, respectable UK authors confess on video to classic books they haven’t read. My favourite is the guy who wrote his O levels on Wuthering Heights by using his parents’ constant raving as his source material, and scored his school’s highest grade ever without having read the book. That’s hardcore, bruthah.

Humiliation, the game is called. And that’s what it inflicts. You have to confess to a famous book you haven’t read – and there’s no opportunity for sly self-congratulation.

You can’t just plead that, gosh, though you simply ADORE Perec you blush to admit you only got halfway through La Disparation in the original French. You only score points in the game according to how many other players HAVE read it.

So in the David Lodge story that popularised this gruesome entertainment, an academic wins the game – but loses his job – by confessing: “Hamlet.” It was with his downfall in mind that we hit on our idea.

During this year’s Ways With Words festival at Dartington Hall, Devon, we would collar our guests and ask: what’s the book you’re most ashamed of never having read?

I enjoy telling this story, and I’ve told several times before, but it’s my blog so: I once won a silk shirt from Michael Ondaatje in a contest held at Michael Redhill’s house when Andre Alexis was challenging the crowd to find someone willing to admit to three “nevers”: never been to Spain, never smoked a cigarette, never read Proust. I might have not been the only one in the room qualified, but I was certainly the only one unashamed enough of all three to admit it.

Time to trot out book titles as political shorthand for the educated set. What do candidate book lists say about the people running for office? Mostly they say, “I listened to my PR Director and left the Dan Brown books off the list.”

Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton’s proclaimed reading habits show intriguing overlap, including both the classic American novel Invisible Man and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. (Translation: “I am with you black America; I have some liberal tendencies; I fear the wrath of both God and the electorate in the midwest.”) And so on.

George W said he reads a lot about Churchill. (Translation: “I’m useful in battle.) But he also said in 2006 that he was taking Camus’ Outsider on holiday – we never found out whether it was the promise of gratuitous killing of Arabs that appealed, or whether he wanted us to know he was not the know-nothing hick he was painted as.

Is Kay Ryan actually an “outsider” poet? And what the hell does that even mean? Thankfully, Bob Hoover is investigating.

She has positioned herself as an “outsider” in America’s poetry scene, and the image has stuck. Reports of her appointment last week described her as out of the mainstream.

Her fellow Californian and leading booster, Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, compared her to the once-unknown recluse Emily Dickinson in his essay collection, “Disappearing Ink.”

In truth, Ryan’s as much a part of the Establishment as her 15 predecessors in the honorary position. She published her first collection in 1983. What she lacks is a literary position in a university, teaching remedial English part time at a California college.

“What’s interesting about Kay Ryan is that she’s seen as the first poet laureate who is ostensibly not part of the usual literary scene,” said poet Lynn Emanuel, “but if you look at her bio, she’s held the traditional appointments. Ryan is really part of that upper-level ‘po-biz’ world.

“po-biz”… Bob. Bob, Bob… Are you just going to let that slide?

Here’s a wry report and commentary from the 2008 Griffin Prize readings and ceremony by poet and critic Jason Guriel on the Maisonneuve website. Enjoy the voyeurism.

John Ashbery wins, as expected, and has to be physically helped onto the stage. The thunderous applause causes my table’s tall flower to fall on me, which I’m hoping Ko Un witnessed and will duly transform into a few lines of folk wisdom. Thankfully, the other journalists pitch in to lift the flower off of me. Ashbery wears an outfit similar to last night’s—navy blazer and olive pants—and once again mentions that he grew up listening to CBC radio.

“I’m really very fond of Lake Ontario,” he adds, among other nice things.

Robin Blaser wins too, and, like Ashbery, has to be helped onto the stage (this isn’t your kids’ Griffin). He consults a piece of paper—“I wrote this out just in case”—and seems to get choked-up. He tells the crowd, “You don’t get to be a winner very many times in your life.” Even if you can’t keep a line of Blaser’s poetry in your head, it’s still a touching moment. I try my luck at mingling.

One prominent U.S. poet in attendance, a regular contributor to Poetry magazine, wonders if the applause for Ashbery sounded louder than the applause for Blaser. But then the poet’s wife reminds him that he’s talking to a journalist, and I lose the quote. Still, I’m secretly thrilled someone thinks I’m a journalist. I snoop around some more.

On the endangered species list of literature no creature is more threatened than the grammarian, seen here in her natural habitat, The New York Times. Note the twitching head, the nervous wringing of the reticulated paws, the scared-stiff exclamation point of tail. We’ve been known to use the occasional grammarian for target practice around here. Poor ex-Ninja Pete still has some shuriken scars in his back end from his days bearing my hasty posts. Luckily, I never done killt him.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way — shape-shifting at a rapid pace — than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web’s lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take “hey guys, i’m stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth.” Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as “she admitted her mistake on a message board”?) I can’t tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there.

The Sanhedrins of style at newspapers are not so amused by the merry game of signification. (Derrida’s not big with real newspapermen.) Most of them seem to believe in standardizing spoken English — to a point. At The New York Times, using nonstandard spelling to reflect dialect — “he wuz a good friend” — is seen as a sketchy business, since no two writers do it the same way and since it can reflect bias. But rhetorical eccentricities ought to be preserved. “I’m friends with him 20 years,” for example, does not have to become, “I have been friends with him for 20 years.”

Some architects of Times style have proposed that communication on a message board should be treated like the text of a novel. As novels of sorts, message boards ought to be excerpted using the same protocols that newspaper critics use to quote from fiction. That is, we should go light on the academic sics, addition brackets and omission ellipses, which in a paper can come across as sneering, cluttered, pretentious or all three.

Alex Boyd writes at the Northern Poetry Review about just that. NPR is a great site to which all hungry young essayists and reviewers should be clamouring to get in. Flood them with your suggestions for pieces and reviews.

The reality is that society and art depend on each other. Society provides basic needs and funds special projects. At the very least, allowing people to pursue things in free time without requiring they spend every waking hour on survival. In return, some people provide creative contributions. There’s always a veritable river of bad art, and even good art can’t easily have a measurable, provable emotional value, so critics who see art as irrelevant are always there too. But I believe society exists for people, not the other way around.

Another mistake I made as my belief wavered was to forget that there are quiet heroes, so overshadowed on the day of the attacks: those parents that loathe the job but love the family, and go to stand on the subway platform every morning even though they feel they die a little, each day. These are people who make a tremendous difference in the world. They are not exciting enough for Hollywood to turn into films most of the time, but they are still sometimes sung about (Fanfare for the Common Man, by Copland, comes to mind). They are responsible for a great deal of good in the world, for the anti-headlines we never see: millions of people didn’t murder anyone today. And the fact that their individual actions are not as striking or as loud in volume is hardly a fair or logical comparison.

Some actress I’ve never heard of wrote an intro for a book of poetry that attacked both the obscure and the “humdrum”. And the story has gotten everybody’s knickers twisted (because let’s face it, we all know the Brits are still wearing knickers) and has made the society pages. God, I wish I lived there. (Or at least that I could have the Guardian teleported here daily. It’s the only paper I can imagine myself paying money to buy and read, even with the big fuck-you to the environment.) Can you imagine the life of a story like this here, if say Gordon Pinsent got snippy about Christian Bok in a preface? I’m telling you, my 3-month-old has longer legs.

Lumley praises Cowley for preferring to call herself a writer than a poet: ‘Liz would never dream of describing herself as a “poet”. She even dislikes the very word “poetry” because she feels there is a divisive ring to it, as if the genre were up there on a rarefied pedestal.’

But her comments have drawn the wrath of many of Britain’s leading poets. Ian McMillan, presenter of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, poet in residence at Barnsley football club and a contender for the next Poet Laureate, accused Lumley of being ill-informed. ‘I suspect that she hasn’t read very widely because she’s ignoring the fact that poetry in the 21st century is a broad church,’ he said. ‘It’s sad and frustrating that people can still come up with generalisations like this. You shouldn’t be able to get poems on the first reading. Part of the delight is the time you take with them to understand them. But what’s wrong with humdrum and commonplace, anyway? Frank O’Hara called his poems “lunch poems” because he wrote them in his lunch hour. By the act of writing down his humdrum, it became delightful.’

Wendy Cope, whose 2001 collection If I Don’t Know was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry award, also questioned Lumley’s authority. ‘Joanna Lumley might be widely read, but sometimes people who make comments like this don’t know very much about poetry,’ she said. ‘People make very good poetry out of the humdrum and commonplace. There are lots of poets writing good poetry that is obscure, and the answer is to educate the public to help them understand that.’

An author writes about the experience of finding out her novel was sold to the YA market instead of the adults she wrote it for. I can see how this might have been a bit a shock, Margo, but I have two words that might help contextualize the situation for you, and perhaps even bring a touch of healing: CHA. CHING.

When my agent called to tell me that my novel, “Cures for Heartbreak,” had sold to a publisher, she said, “I have good news and bad news.” The good news: an editor at Random House had read it overnight and made an offer at 7:30 a.m. The bad news: the editor worked at Random House Children’s Books.

My agent recounted the story of my novel’s sale, its rejections and close calls, and its particularly close call with editors at two Random House adult imprints. Both had wanted to buy it until the editor in chief decided the novel would be “better served” by the young adult division.

My literary novel about death and grief, which I’d worked on for eight years, was a young adult book?

Apparently, I had unintentionally slipped across an increasingly porous border, one patrolled by an unlikely guard. “The line between Y.A. and adult has become almost transparent,” said Michael Cart, a former president of the Young Adult Library Services Association and a columnist for Booklist. “These days, what makes a book Y.A. is not so much what makes it as who makes it — and the ‘who’ is the marketing department.”