One million copies of a fake New York Times printed and distributed by a comedy prank troupe. Sweet!

Sorry, folks, the paper isn’t free. And the Iraq war isn’t over, at least not yet.

In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city, including Grand Central Terminal, Washington and Union Squares, the 14th and 23rd Street stations along Eighth Avenue, and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, among others.

The spurious 14-page papers — with a headline “IRAQ WAR ENDS” — surprised commuters, many of whom took the free copies thinking they were legitimate.

The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics.

A piece on how the oxymoron is especially suited to our times.

The oxymoron should not be overused; it is a figure of speech that gains its force from the unexpected, bringing something like an intake of breath, the feeling of a palpable hit. So it is in that same ode by Horace when he accuses the love-goddess Venus, who arranges so many inappropriate couplings, of “savage playfulness”. The Latin word is iocus, from which our “joke” comes.

One stock that has been rising in recent weeks is that of the savage joke. We seem to be living in times of serious absurdity, or absurd seriousness: in oxymoronic times. At dinner the other night with three eminent cellists, all in their eighties, I heard how the grandson of one of them had earned a bonus of £400,000 in his first year as a banker, aged 23. In the next few years his bonuses were much more than that.

This young man had been to Eton; and I remembered that in my first year teaching English there, in the 1980s, I had earned around £8,000 – which seemed a wonderful amount of money, and enabled me to buy a smart second-hand Citroen GS. In one of my classes it happened to come up that I too had been a pupil at Eton. The boys looked at me with bemusement: “What went wrong, I mean how come you ended up teaching?” asked one of the more gauche.

It was clear to them that anyone with any sense would go into the City, to earn what people often call, with unconscious use of oxymoron, “serious money”. The idea that one might consider teaching, or education – what Plato called the wheeling round of the soul so that it can endure contemplation of the real world – a more serious vocation than gambling, however lucratively, with other people’s money, would have seemed outlandish to many of them.

Gee, I wonder if this post will get any comments…. Are males encouraged more than females in the books world? My partner, Lady Ninja (aka Ailsa Craig), a sociologist who studies these kinds of things, has found this in her research. She’s written about how male authors are challenged to improve their work, while their female counterparts are merely congratulated on any level of initial success. Interesting stuff.

I was reminded of this episode last week, when I found out that my first book, Selling Your Father’s Bones, had been shortlisted for this year’s John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The venerable award is given to the best work of literature by a UK or Commonwealth writer under the age of 35, so making the shortlist, alongside such talents as Aravind Adiga and Ross Raisin, was a genuinely breath-taking, eye-welling moment. But there was also a feeling of curiosity, perhaps confusion. The six of us on the list were all men. And the five authors who’d made the shortlist for this year’s Guardian First Book Prize were also all men. John Dugdale, writing in Saturday’s Guardian, called it a “strange pattern”. So what’s going on?

The first explanation is that there’s a gender bias in the judging of literary awards. I think that’s absolutely not the case (”But then you would say that…”). Women held the majority vote on the John Llewellyn Rhys panel and the chairpersonship of the Guardian prize – and it’s surely a testament to how very seriously the judges took their responsibility that they didn’t hastily re-shuffle the pack when they spotted the chromosome imbalance of their final selections.

Do, perhaps, publishing houses nominate their young male authors for awards more liberally than their young female ones? Again, no, as publishing houses by and large nominate every possible book for every conceivable prize they have even the slightest chance of winning. That scattergun knows no bias.

But does the literary industry as a whole – agents, editors, booksellers and critics – currently offer disproportionate encouragement to aspiring male writers to produce the kind of serious-minded, bookish work that gets on shortlists, compared to young female writers? Now, I suspect, we’re on to something.

Salman feels bleak about the world, and shows one audience member what happens when you ask an stupid question.

Then came a question from an audience member about “oppression” and its positive effect on writing.

“I was doing just fine before,” Mr. Rushdie responded. “I would have been quite happy, thank you very much, to trot along with a thousand other things–like, you know, having my books translated into 40 languages and selling millions of copies. But you’re right, there was a spike in the tension that happened around 1989, but it’s long gone. I think if any of this stuff continues to be of interest, it will have to be of interest in the text itself.”

He continued: “The rest of it is a passing thing. … If you are asking me if I would rather it hadn’t happened, yes, I would rather it hadn’t happened. On the whole, if you could possibly avoid being sentenced to death by a tyrannical leader of a foreign power who then sends international mercenaries to carry out the sentence, if you could possibly avoid that, I would wholly recommend it.”

A Living Library? Um, I’ll take two Lisa Loeb’s and one Janeane Garofalo and I’ll see you back here in about 10 minutes. Oh, the stories. Right. Whatever works. Seriously, what a fantastic idea and, in California, lawsuit opportunity.

On Oct. 18, the Santa Monica Public Library hosted an unusual interactive event called “The Living Library,” in which people were the books and could be checked out for half an hour’s conversation. Borrowers were instructed that “the Reader must return the Book in the same mental and physical condition as borrowed. It is forbidden to cause damage to the book, tear out or bend pages, get food or drink spilled over the book or hurt her or his dignity in any other way.”

When I suggested to my 10-year-old son, Luke, and his pal, Grace, that it might be cool to go check out a book-person, they were dubious. They’re good readers and completely comfortable at the big library, but that’s because they know what will happen there and what is expected of them. They had a lot of questions about living books. Could they take out a book together? What exactly were they supposed to do with them? Would the books tell them stories?

‘Ninja K’s been busy with The Magazine this fall, and here she interviews gracious wunderkind Nam Le, the Vietnam-born, Australia-raised author of The Boat, who has recently won both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35″ Award.

Nam Le is a poised and charming new writer on the scene—-his debut collection is being suitably lauded everywhere. The Boat is an unlinked collection of stories, and unlinked in the most pleasing fashion. Nam leaps geographic and cultural boundaries with seemingly effortless ventriloquism. Nam and Kathryn cover here identity, appropriation, autobiography, metafiction, as well as, how to publish a collection of stories. Have a listen, and then go out and buy this book.

CanWest in rough times, cuts 560 jobs… ouch

JK Rowling writes about her favourite scene in the Harry Potter books

Muslim, women’s groups protest TO Life article on “honour killing” of young girl

Best illustrated kids books of the year (slideshow at NYT)

The FBI and Norman Mailer

First Warwick Prize for writing longlist

How do you build momentum for a book when the author’s not around anymore?

“The retail channel was key,” says Bogaards. “In the absence of bookseller enthusiasm you might, as a publisher, have a problem.”

The goal, Bogaards says, was to build momentum in the form of advance book sales. Knopf also took out a late summer ad in The New York Times Book Review offering a free copy of the thriller to anyone who wrote asking for one.

Bloggers also got into the act: The books had already appeared on five European best-seller lists by the time Knopf secured the American rights, and many U.S.-based bloggers who had read raves about Larsson from their European counterparts had finagled copies of the books from overseas. They began touting the book early this year.

Cartoonists Seth adn Chester Brown have written a letter to the GG organizers protesting the billing of the lone graphic novel in the English language children’s lit section. It was written and illustrated respectively by cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, but only the writer is cited on the official nomination. Nuh-uh, say Brown and Seth.

“We are glad to see that a graphic novel has made the short list for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards,” states the letter, which was sent Wednesday afternoon.

“We’re guessing that the jury who read Skim saw it as an illustrated novel. It’s not; it’s a graphic novel,” write Brown and Seth, whose letter also received the support of leading comic world heavyweights including Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Chris Oliveros.

“The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together are the text. Try to imagine evaluating Skim if you couldn’t see the drawings. Jillian’s contribution to the book goes beyond mere illustration: she was as responsible for telling the story as Mariko was,” the letter states.

Profiled in New York Magazine.

What’s a put-upon guru to do? Gladwell isn’t about to give back his advances or stop speaking at business conferences, but he is trying to take his writing in a more meaningful direction. Where he once focused on cool-hunting and T-shirts in his New Yorker articles, now it’s IQ tests and pension systems. “There is a kind of underlying social vision in a lot of his pieces,” says Henry Finder, his editor at the magazine. “The basic vision says how we fare in life isn’t just determined by ourselves and our character, it’s determined by a lot of other things that are beyond our control.” Gladwell has expanded that social vision into a book that he describes as “more political” and “a little angrier” than his previous efforts. “The interesting part of this now is trying to figure out what you do with the idea,” he says, explaining the new approach he took with Outliers, “as opposed to before, where the interesting part was just explaining the idea.” Bruce Headlam, a childhood friend of Gladwell’s who’s now an editor at the New York Times, calls Outliers “the book that’s closest to Malcolm’s heart.”

“When I wrote Tipping Point, my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it,” Gladwell says. “I had no notion I was creating a kind of public document. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put the podium to waste.” Which raises the question: With his new book that purports to tell “the story of success,” has Gladwell finally found an idea substantial enough to justify his own?

The IMPAC longlist, which is indeed comically long at 147 books, includes a few Canadians. But at that length, you’d be surprised if it didn’t include a few of everybody. A quick skim shows a few names we might recognize as our own, including Alissa York, Lawrence Hill, Michael Winter, Elizabeth Hay,  David Chariandy, David Adams Richards, Gil Adamson, Michael Ondaatje, and of course, Haruki Murakami, Doris Lessing and JM Coetzee. (You know, I think those last three each spent at least 10 minutes on Canadian soil, and that’s enough for me.)

The economic crisis has hit publishing too, with layoffs and downsizing everywhere, but this coming Christmas may be the proverbial straw, say worried booksellers and publishers. Come January, where will we stand?

Now, most everyone in publishing is bracing for a difficult holiday season while trying to remain optimistic about the enduring allure of books.

“A book is still this incredibly lovely, respectable gift,” said Jamie Raab, publisher of Grand Central Publishing, and is “a lot cheaper than the other luxury items that people tend to buy at Christmas.”

“So we could get lucky and see that it really works in our favor,” she added.

Grand Central is enjoying strong sales of titles by the novelists Nelson DeMille and Nicholas Sparks, as well as of “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World,” but it also is waiting to see how Ted Turner’s “Call Me Ted,” for which it spent more than $5 million, will sell. Ms. Raab said the company had printed 625,000 copies and had shipped more than 500,000.

With several publishers reporting that booksellers were cutting orders for January, Ms. Raab acknowledged that she was concerned about a post-New Year’s downturn. “You know to a certain extent people will be in the stores during the holidays,” she said. “What will happen once there is no reason to be in the stores?”

Harper’s war against culture may have been in part used as an election ploy to divide the country, but it’s also a real ongoing issue. Don’t let your advocacy die. Inspired by his recent decision to can the National Portrait Gallery, some enterprising young advocates have created a site where you can “frame” Harper yourself. Send in your portraits of our frightening PM, in any medium. Sounds like fun. I suggest limericks.

Since Stephen Harper cancelled the National Portrait Gallery, we decided to create our own in his honour. We’re inviting artists to submit their portrait of Canada’s Prime Minister for inclusion in the Stephen Harper Portrait Gallery, and their chance to win (minor) fame and riches!

The Conservative Party has made many, many cuts to the arts, so our jury will be looking for portraits that best embody Stephen Harper’s “commitment” to the arts and culture in Canada.

Our favourite entry will win a minimum of $1000! Runners-up will also win loot, with other prizes to be announced shortly. There is no entry fee, and we encourage everyone to participate. Selected works will be put on display in an exhibition in Ottawa and Montreal with possible shows to follow in other Canadian cities.

No, not the instructions for sawing the barrel off a 12-gauge—-Daphne du Maurier! The indiscriminently-wielded sawed-off shotgun of literature.

Everyone knows to beware the green-eyed monster that doth make you sick, but it’s easier said than done when you are eaten up inside with jealousy.

The best remedy, in my experience, is to re-read Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which is a like-for-like cure.

Well, now our electronic archive can survive us once the robot army rises and destroys our flesh forms and enslaves the computing power of our brains to run electronic custodial devices used to sweep away the glowing hot metal shavings peeled off from their hideous, shrieking robot sex.

Late last month, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Googlesell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print.

“Almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet,” wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London, on his blog.

Does literature do a better job of explaining the world to itself than academia? Well, duh. Eight people read each academic book and five of them have essays in it.  Academia shouldn’t be trying to explain the world to the world, it should be trying to explain it to the novelists and poets. We’ll take it from there. Stand back, you pencilnecks. We have work to do.

Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Novels should be required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does,” said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute.

He said: “Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job – if not a better one – of representing and communicating the realities of international development.

“While fiction may not always show a set of presentable research findings, it does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does.

“And fiction often reaches a much larger and diverse audience than academic work and may therefore be more influential in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues.”

A terrible situation over there.

An internet blogger and a writer who disguised an attack on Burma’s dictator in the form of a love poem were among dozens of activists sentenced to draconian jail terms as the junta ordered a fresh crackdown on dissidents.

Nay Myo Kyaw, 28, who wrote blogs under the name Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years and 6 months in jail by a court in Rangoon. The poet, Saw Wai, received a two-year sentence for an eight-line Valentine’s Day verse published in a popular magazine.

Aung Thein, the lawyer for the men, was given four months in prison on Monday for contempt of court during his defence.

More than a dozen people arrested during the protests last year against the ruling junta were handed harsh prison terms yesterday. “Altogether 23 activists were sentenced today at Insein prison. They were sentenced to 65 years each,” a family member of one jailed activist said.

Now, regarding poetry, and at the risk of making light of a terrible situation in Burma, I’d like to suggest that this kind of penalty could go a long way here, so long as the criteria for imprisionment were about quality rather than content…

Three previously published books are rebound as one and re-released. Is it a new book? Should it be eligible for awards, etc? McGrath, the NYT’s literary crime dog, investigates the case of Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, published by Modern Library, which used to be Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone.

“It wasn’t really a controversy,” said Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the awards. “It was as much a head-scratcher as anything else.” He explained that the foundation ruled twice, in effect, on the book’s eligibility — once when “Shadow Country” was submitted, and again when the panel of judges asked for guidelines, without mentioning a specific title. “We allow collections of previously published material,” he said. “Collected poems, collected essays, short-story collections — books like that. We don’t allow reprints, but we didn’t consider this a reprint. There’s a lot of new writing here.”

“There’s no perfect system, and we try to leave it up to the judges,” he added. “I can’t give you a percentage of how much new writing there needs to be for a book to be eligible. The issue is whether it’s a different reading experience, and that’s for the judges to decide.”

The people at OUP blog have written in, having noticed the furor on our own boards about most-hated-phrases, and note their own post, which explains that there’s more to the book than a list of hated phrases, and offers a quiz on the evolution of certain well-known sayings.

Those of you who are, like me, blog-o-holics, will no doubt have seen some of the coverage for our book  Damp Squid, by Jeremy Butterfield. The blogs picked up on the 10 most annoying words and phrases in the English language, but that’s not all that’s in the book. Jeremy Butterfield also examines phrases that have been slightly distorted over the years, so that what we say is often not what was originally meant.

Nam Le wins Dylan Thomas

Wole Soyinka Prize awarded to YA fantasy novel in Africa

French lit awards go to immigrants

PEN USA Award winners

Whiting Award gives poet strength to go on

Anne Rice, long-time typist of homoerotic vampire novels, faces the screaming existential void of advancing years and suddenly converts from one kind of blood drinking to another, thereby winning Bookninja’s Hypocrit-Nutbar-with-a-Lot-of-’Splainin’-to-Do of the Month Golden Shuriken Award

Joseph Boyden, novelist and occasional Bookninja, wins the Giller Prize last night for Through Black Spruce.

Raised in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale, Boyden first made a splash on the literary scene with his debut novel Three Day Road, released in 2005. The First World War tale about two Cree snipers went on to win many accolades, including the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award as well as the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

In a biographical video portrait shown during the ceremony, Boyden referenced his mixed heritage (Irish, Scottish and Métis) and said that, in his writing, he sought to explore the spiritual and physical beauty present in his culture.

Winning the prestigious Giller Tuesday night “means that I am allowed to continue writing and I will always write about the First Nations of Canada and I will always celebrate and be behind the First Nations of Canada,” Boyden said after his win.

“And I will always push the message that we need to heal.”

Well, it’s that time of year: Gillertime. They should put that on low-hanging pool table lamps for upscale bars that cater to literati. Gillertime. And everyone’s talking about all the awards being handed out like stocking stuffers to good the kids, with the vast majority of everyone else getting the lump of coal that is, as the French say, Jacques Squatte. A few things are going on today:

Philip Marchand unpacks the jury process and examines the Giller nominees, and even gives you a betting crib sheet

The Star has a piece on the myriad fancy galas for rich artists living off the dime of ordinary folk

A live panel discussion on the Giller, GGs, and awards in general, at the National Post, in which I’ll be taking part, apparently (I say apparently because I still can’t figure out how to get in there). It starts at noon EST at the link above, and the participants are many and varied (see list below). Readers are invited to chime in with questions and comments, I think.

Doug Pepper, President and Publisher, McClelland and Stewart

Lewis DeSoto, author of Blade of Grass, longlisted for the Booker Prize

Nino Ricci, author of The Origin of Species, 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards nominee

Yvonne Hunter, our Director of Marketing and Publicity, Penguin Canada

Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Winner 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize

George Murray, Editor, Bookninja.com

Sarah MacLachlan, President of House of Anansi

Doug Hunter, author God’s Mercies, 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award nominee

Martha Kanya-Forstner, Editorial Director, Doubleday Canada

Terry Fallis, author of The Best Laid Plans, winner of 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

I have no idea how this will turn out or what form it will take, so drop on by and if you find Sarah MacLachlan has me in a headlock while Doug Pepper works over my kidneys and Nino Ricci preparing to pants me, please, someone call the teacher.

The Guardian runs an excerpt from Siegfried Sassoon’s memoirs, lest we forget.

I seemed to be getting pretty handy with my pistol, I thought, for the conditions in quadrangle trench were giving me a sort of angry impetus. In some places it was only a foot deep, and already men were lying wounded and killed by sniping. There were high-booted German bodies, too, and in the blear beginning of daylight they seemed as much the victims of a catastrophe as the men who had attacked them.

As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face was undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He’d evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn’t look to be more than 18. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I’d ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyway I hadn’t expected the battle of the Somme to be quite like this.

One woman’s battle to bring poetry back into everyday life to help improve the world. Sigh. I love you hopeless heroes. I mean, I really do.

Going to a library to listen to an actor read poems is not, she insists, an act of self-improvement. “It’s allowing yourself to stop depriving yourself of what is incandescently beautiful in life. To deny yourself that is voluntarily to starve your soul. And if your soul is starved it is impossible to be happy. Modern life makes it hard for people to feed their souls, and that’s what people find there. They’re on a starvation diet and they come out and they suddenly think: ‘My god! This is a feast!’

“After all, what is it that makes us human? It is language. And poetic language is the most rare form. It’s like a gem because the wisdom and insight of the poet is compressed into it. It’s a thrilling thing that a line can set off in your mind a whole world of potential experience. Either it inspires you in terms of wanting certain experiences, or it can help you to treasure the experience within those lines. And therefore life, for the short time we’re on this Earth, is immensely enriched.”

Once they’re dead and buried in the cold cold ground, I see no reason why peace cannot be discussed. But I digress. An interesting piece on the struggle for coexistance between print and e-media. The real “take-away message” here: Bookninja is older than Facebook. Neener-neener.

“On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “the world changed.” Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped — top down became bottom up — and people-powered content started to change the way we think. ¶ In 2002, I owned a small independent publisher, Context Books. That year, we published a beer coaster of a book titled “War on Iraq.” The substance was a hybrid: part-book, part-blog. Former U.N. Special Commission inspector Scott Ritter had spent the summer of 2002 telling anyone who would listen that President Bush was going to start a war in Iraq and that it would end in disaster. We boiled that down into a punchy project — concept to bookshelf: eight weeks. Six months later, the president was on TV telling America about the war he’d just launched.
…
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think.” It was about a hypothetical machine called the Memex, a mechanized desk attached to microfiche scrolls that could potentially store entire libraries.

Sixty-three years later, the Atlantic featured another essay, by Nicholas Carr, called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer was an emphatic, if not altogether wistful, “Yes.”

Many old-schoolers fear that the Internet means the end of them. For the rest of us, suggests Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga, founder of the political website the Daily Kos, “Google makes it possible to learn anything, near instantaneously. Like natural selection, there are species that adapt to the changing environment around them and thrive, and others die off.”

Though there might be little interest in a bio book from Wubblewoo, there’s plenty for a book from Palin. The world is a topsy-turvy place, people. One in which you may occasionally feel compelled to slit your wrists and write angry manifestos in blood on the mirror, but I encourage you to bury those feelings of bewilderment, outrage, and murderous desire deep down inside you, saved for the day the pitchforks and torches come out and the world marches to war for sanity. IE, Wednesday.

CAA, ICM, William Morris, Paradigm and other agencies “smell books, talk shows and commentary for Fox and CNN” as possibilities for the Alaska governor, West Coast PR man Hal Lifson told us.

“There are several of our imprints who are eager to talk to Governor Palin,” Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum said. “She clearly has a constituency and we know books by conservatively-centered politicos usually sell very, very well.”

Public-relations powerhouse Howard Rubenstein added, “She’s poised to make a ton of money.” But he warned, “She ought to keep an eye on what her goals are for 2012. If she plays a game and looks foolish, if she sounds like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about – like saying Africa is a country – she may talk herself out of a political job.”

I thought she already did that….

Jessa points to a blog that examines how to be “good” in your book buying habits. The answer? Don’t just buy from ndie stores, buy from indie presses.

The book world is struggling, particularly with respect to fiction. Major publishers have become exceedingly bottom-line-centric. Whereas debut authors have a relatively easy time getting a book deal—we all love the hot new thing—a writer trying to publish her second book is at the mercy of the sales numbers from her previous titles. According to one publishing industry blogger, if a writer has already put out a work of literary fiction, a press can essentially score their marketability: if the book sold more than 7,000 copies, the author is a star; if it sold between 4,000 and 7,000 copies, she is a “strong seller.” If a previous novel sold between 2,000 and 4,000 copies, she may not get another contract. If she sold fewer than 1,500 copies, her next book will be a tough sell.

Since so few people buy literary fiction, a few copies go a long way. Your purchases could help keep an author writing and a press publishing. Many laud the virtues of buying books from independent bookstores, and I’m all for that. I focus, however, on what I buy, not where I buy it—I may order novels from amazon.com, but I favor those published by independent presses or written by lesser-known authors (regardless of publisher). Each time you buy a book this way, you help preserve literary diversity.

Mental note: get elected President of the United States of America. I’ll put that on the list right away. Let’s see. It can go here, right after “scrub pureed pea stains out of ironic “spit happens” bib”. But Obama’s election wasn’t only good for Obama’s books, it was also great for newspapers as a whole. Apparently you had to line up for them in New York.

The election of Barack Obama produced a clamor for newspapers that publishers said they had never seen. From The Cincinnati Enquirer to The Charlotte Observer to The Dallas Morning News, papers accustomed to years of declining sales pumped out extra copies by the thousands, and could not keep pace with demand.

But these were not papers to be consumed and crumpled as usual.

“Oh no, no fingerprints on this one,” said James Allen, a delivery man from the Bronx, who stood in line for half an hour outside the Manhattan headquarters of The New York Times to get a copy. “This goes straight into a plastic bag. This is a black man becoming president. This is history, to show my grandkids some day.”

Many buyers posed for pictures holding up the front page. Copies of Wednesday’s major papers sold on eBay and Craigslist for more than $200.

Newspapers anticipated some extra demand, but they underestimated. The New York Times had printed 35 percent more than the usual number of copies for individual sale on Wednesday, an increase of about 150,000. Later, it printed 75,000 more.

New in The Bookninja Magazine today is Kathryn’s interview with Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game, which K totally adores. It’s next up on my reading list, especially after reading this interview. Check it out.

Lee: The Man Game is a bit of everything, yeah, as a street performance, like a much more dangerous form of busking. The game or sport or dance or routine, as the man game’s variously seen by folks in the story, is a fiction at heart. The man game doesn’t exist, it only represents.

Kathryn: So its meaning depends on who’s interpreting?

Lee: Never trust the artist, trust the tale, said DH Lawrence. And I like to trust the tale, too. I take the theme and throw myself at it. Meaning and value is tough to talk about, but I assume it comes from a combination of my efforts and the readers’. I saw the man game in opposition to a team of toughs: prejudice, history, identity. This game trips up the action of the standard western drama, wrecking the set and scaring the actors. I wanted to press history for its literary qualities rather than praise and uphold the veracity of the narrative. I wanted something nakedly fictional that would demand history disrobe, too. History is a main adversary in the book, and physicality and psychology were allies. I wanted the book to raise all those questions you asked about the impulse to dance and compete, the bravado of fisticuffs, the sex and the frustration of bachelordom, and this novel was my response to those questions. I worked to make the language metabolically and hypertonically extreme.

A publisher offers books for free to bloggers who will agree to review them. This is the kind of thing that reminds us most blogs are the virtual desks of regular people chatting to themselves and their friends, as opposed to media outlets. It brings down the reputation of the medium as a whole.

Michael Hyatt is now the man in charge at Thomas Nelson Books, and his vision of the common reader is apparently the blogger. But instead of remembering his company’s humble beginnings, Hyatt sees this new “common reader” not so much as a thinking individual, but as a marketing tool for marketing Thomas Nelson’s catalogue. It all started off somewhat innocuously back in August, when Hyatt established an informal scenario whereby bloggers could get a specific book in exchange for a promise to blog a 200-word review, “positive, negative, or somewhere in between.”

But Hyatt got greedy and honed his quid pro quo. Last week, Hyatt announced on his blog that he would tweak his “experiment.” Not only would any blogger requesting a free book be required to post a 200-word review on his blog, they would also have to submit the review to “a consumer detail page” along the lines of Amazon.

Wired reports that Oxford researchers have put their massive melons to good use and come up with a list of  the world’s most annonying phrases. I would add one more to make it 11: any phrase that begins with “A top 10 list of”. Any more that particularly bother you?

The great hierarchy of verbal fatigue includes:

1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, supposedly “unfilmable”, to be “filmed”

Canadian Children’s Literature Award handed out

Podcast on children’s lit in the UK

RIP: John Leonard, critic, dead at 69

Rowling endorses (a different) fan’s Harry history book

Slate has a piece on the recently deceased Michael Crichton, analysing where it all went intellectually wrong, in terms of literary value, whatever that means these days. I have to admit, I’ve never read a Crichton, and I don’t really miss having not. Having seen a couple of the movies, I’m sure they covered the ground sufficiently. I thought it was too early for satire, but it’s not.

“I had gradated from Harvard, taught at Cambridge University, climbed the Great Pyramid, earned a medical degree, married and divorced, been a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, published two bestselling novels, and now made a movie. And I had abruptly run out of goals for myself.” Crichton was 30 years old.

He eventually gave up movies and solidified his niche as a thriller writer whose books often crept onto the top-10 lists. But Chricton’s books have suffered as his right-leaning politics have come to the fore. Titles like Rising Sun, Disclosure, and Airframe (about the mendacity of the electronic media) were naked political screeds designed to land him on the op-ed page.

To understand how Crichton stumbled, it’s instructive to compare him to two past masters of suspense fiction: Arthur Conan Doyle (whom Crichton celebrates in Rising Sun) and H. Rider Haggard (whose King Solomon’s Mines is a model for Crichton’s safari book Congo). Doyle and Haggard opened their most famous novels by setting loose a familiar hero (Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermain) on a mystery or quest, complete with new enemies and a cast of supporting players. The joy of reading Doyle and Haggard is to enjoy the conventions and watch the authors sweat to provide inventive variations on a theme. Which clue will Holmes seize upon to crack the case? Upon which corner of Africa will Quatermain inflict his colonialist brio?

Crichton, on the other hand, eschews flesh-and-blood heroes; the star of his book is usually a high-concept premise—dinosaurs! killer viruses! Without a returning hero to lure readers (à la Tom Clancy), Crichton’s concepts themselves must be nerdy and sufficiently topical.

Carl has some interesting thoughts on what will surely be an interesting book: Kafka’s writings on the offic,  done during his time as a high ranking lawyer. Kafkaesque bureaucratic bewilderment existed pre-Kafka. He just got it down.

Besides the fact that there can never be enough Kafka, the fascination is because his work focuses so much on the existential-nightmare side of bureaucracy and business: Looking at these documents will be kind of like seeing a photo of the prostitute that posed for the Mona Lisa. As Stanley Corngold says in his introduction (downloadable at the Princeton site): “The specter of bureaucracy haunts Kafka day and night in every corner of his writing life.” It was both his subject and his nemesis, his “hook into the real,” and in many ways it gave his writing form, in a mutually parasitic relationship – his office work leeched on his time and energy as a writer, and yet his writing sucked blood and guts out of office life, aka the trial, aka the castle, etc.

For what it’s worth, I actually filled this out and sent a message to Obama. I’m not sure why, but the optimistic cynic within me that has been quelled by this charming man still wants a word, so I attached the following personal message. I’m sure he’ll get right to it and respond post haste.

Dear Barack Obama,

Congratulations, and please remember that real change means fundamental ideological, economic, and infrastructure shifts, and that your eight years will be only the very beginning of this.

Your victory has symbolically ended an outdated mode of Western being. What you are here to do is set the foundations and create the systems necessary for a new age of peace, prosperity, and responsibility to exist and thrive beyond you.

George Murray

A look back at the discontented writers of the 60s is an interesting piece for someone born immediately thereafter.

The revolution — the one that took place in the 1960s — was in fact televised. The music, the antiwar movement, the drug culture and the social upheaval of the era became major benefactors of the first wave of saturation media coverage. To the straight world, the events that defined “the ’60s” were jarring anomalies that shook the status quo. Moms and dads across America recoiled in front of their sets, fingers crossed that their kids weren’t getting their heads busted by the cops.

It was a brave new world, at least while it lasted. “We no longer had to ask permission for our choices and convictions,” Mikal Gilmore writes in the introduction to “Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents,” a collection of cultural eulogies of the era and its most important figures.

Help save Al Purdy’s house by donating your own poems

Poet hopes to use poetry to disarm youth… Not this poet. This poet uses a truncheon to disarm knife-wielding yoots

Poetry needs to get unromanticizallyationed

A dark secret: he wrote poetry

Obama day two: hope continues, occasionally in the form of art and culture.

Poets asked to write the election analysis op-ed in verse

It’s time to start liking American culture again, apparently

Obama had all the best tunes

Obama’s pop culture picks

You can have a first hand account of the Charge of the Light Brigade, the event, not the poem, for the right price…

Harvard says no to Google

National novel writing month

Whole memoirs written in six words

Thriller author whose books were often adapted by Hollywood, dead at 66.

Huh, that’s funny. Considering the worth of the published ones. I jest. I jest because you love it. Sam Jordison, whose opinion, on everything but Coetzee, you can generally trust, reports.

There’s nothing new about writers’ bottom drawers being emptied out after they die, but news that another “Beat” novel is about to hit the shelves initially struck me as one previously unpublished publication too far. It makes sense that this most rock’n'roll group of dead star writers should be subjected to the repackage, reissue, re-evaluate, extra-track-and-a-free-poster treatment. But it’s hard not to be cynical when there are so many non-author-approved works out there, not to mention all those endless biographies, films and documentaries.

I remained unimpressed, even when I heard that the book gloried in the title And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks and saw the beautifully understated cover. I was especially wary of anything that might somehow so far have escaped publication, since the Beats were already quite prepared to publish any amount of incoherent guff in their own lifetimes. Kerouac’s Book Of Dreams, which I forced myself to read when a student, is a not even half-formed case in point. That’s a book that the man wrote when half asleep. About stuff he couldn’t remember properly. And wasn’t even that interesting in the first place. What could possibly have merited less attention from the barrel scraper than that?

Kundera has vehemently denied the spy charges against him, and he’s getting some heavyweight backing in the form of famous writers, including some Nobel Laureates.

Four Nobel Prize-winners for literature have joined seven other distinguished writers in issuing a statement of support for the Czech-born author Milan Kundera, who has been accused of informing for the Communist secret police when he was a student.

This totally reminds me of the time I got Wislawa Szymborska, JM Coetzee, and Gabriel García Márquez to vouch that I did not indeed double-dip my strawberry in the liquid chocolate fountain at the Griffin Awards a couple years ago, as was insinuated by a horrified Aislinn Hunter.

Back in 2001, when I was living in New York, I started following the book blog MobyLives. It got me through some exceptionally boring days in my cubicle and it kept me informed about what to do in the evenings. I struck up a correspondence with proprietor Dennis Loy Johnson, mostly at first, if you can believe it, sending him typo reports which he would correct post haste. Eventually, I ended up doing Canadian correspondence for Moby’s early podcasts. I also used Moby as the main model for early Bookninja in 2003. As I tease Dennis, on the rare occasion when I see him these days, he’s my e-Grandpappy. Anyway, Moby birthed the publisher Melville House, which eventually lead to the neglect and demise of MobyLives.com. Now it’s back and I couldn’t be happier, you know, in the e-sense. The more the merrier. And Dennis’s blog has a great industry focus and he’s a journalist of impeccable taste and integrity. Welcome back!

Inspired by our own cover redesign contest, which became a news item with serious legs, having been picked up in newspapers and blogs all around the world (I heard somewhere that the NYT will be covering it this weekend?), The Guardian last week ran a gallery of our finalist covers both in the paper and online and asked its readers if they could do better. The results are up and the winner has been picked. Some funny covers here, I think, but you be the judge.

Phew.

Two pieces on Toni Morrison: one, a lukewarm review, by Lionel Shriver in the Telegraph, and one on the dangers of celebrity in the Guardian.

All writers, to a greater or lesser extent, have to have a private and a public persona. But real fame complicates this already tender balance. Once an author has made that leap in to the public gaze, regardless of their reputation and their authorial qualities, their reputation is in danger of taking a nosedive. Somehow, outside of the rarefied literary community, they appear less serious, less important as cultural figures – as Martin Amis, post-teeth, discovered. The same fate befell Salman Rushdie as his marriage and New York socialising became marginally more interesting than his increasingly turgid novels. Fame is a prism that alters both perception of writers and the writers themselves, and rarely is this for the good. Toni Morrison is perhaps the exception.

This woman’s life sounds more interesting than her novels.

For most of the time that she has been working on the book, Ms. Chute has also been greatly occupied with an organization called the 2nd Maine Militia, of which she is the founder and, as she says, “secretary of offense, or offensiveness.”

The copier in her living room is used to churn out tracts and fables, mostly written by Ms. Chute and illustrated by her husband, that set out the group’s political philosophy, which is essentially one of cheerful, nonpartisan economic populism.

The 2nd Maine Militia, or Your Wicked Good Militia, as it’s sometimes known, is progun, against corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, and opposed to tax subsidies for big business. The group has been known to meet in a hired hall, but more often it assembles in the woods behind the Chutes’ home, where the members shoot at cans and other targets, talk about what’s wrong with the world and dine on potluck.

In 1996, in an incident recreated in “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” the militia invaded the State Capitol in Augusta, carrying placards that read, “Smash Corporate Tyranny.” Many of the militia children were in costume, and Mr. Chute wore a Revolutionary War uniform. There were some kazoo-playing and a little shouting, and someone duct-taped a piece of cardboard over a portrait of Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine governor and Civil War hero.

The 2nd Maine Militia is a no-wing organization, Ms. Chute likes to say, with a membership that is “very right, very left and very shy.” At the first meeting, in the mid-’90s, she explained: “We had libertarians, greens, guys in camo, white supremacists, hippies off the land, anarchists, people from Communist organizations. All these people were people that someone had tried to take something away from. They all knew something was wrong.”

Obama knows how to use language like no president since Kennedy. Let’s hope it pays off for him today.

Feverishly streaming clips of Obama over the past weeks, I’ve been struck by the freshness of his conversational style. In one interview on The Daily Show he explained how the electorate wanted to “look under the hood and kick the tyres” before they voted for him, implying solid construction while also invoking the American automotive tradition. If we unpack it a little further, there are other metaphors nestled within: he’s “roadworthy” and already has “a few miles on the clock”. In short, he has the necessary experience.

The NYT’s Sam Tanenhaus interviews John Updike about fiction and politics (video).

Dear America,

What are you doing reading this? Seriously. Go vote. Your democratic process is a beacon for all. Just be sure to not leave any chads hanging. And don’t get bullied at the polls. And try not to use the Diebold machines that are hackable (and possibly preprogrammed with election results).

But if you could also be so kind as to ensure that someone who has crashed 5 fighter jets but was still kept in the cockpit because his daddy ran the navy, who has voted 90% of the time with the Bush administration that has so fubared the world that we’re heading into an economic depression of epic proportions, and who is known to have such a vicious temper that he called his wife a cunt in front of reporters doesn’t have the codes to your nuclear arsenal, we would really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

The Rest of the Planet