Globe leads national newspaper awards in Canada (I hear they’re a shoe-in for Best Poker Face in Shutting Down a Beloved Section)

Speaking of the books section — the Globe’s books editor Martin Levin has scored a Templeton–Cambridge Journalism Fellowship (way to go, Martin!)


There’s some stuff going on in Oz around importing books… Here’s the analysis and here’s the original report, for those who can make sense of this sort of thing (thanks, Owl)

I love how the French can get all riled up over a book… God bless their smoky, brie- and baguette-filled souls

Shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

A bookselling model for hard times? — The remainders-only store

I remember when I first gained sentience… don’t worry, you get over it.

You’re a sucker if you’re using free webmail and it’s not Gmail… it’s so awesome. And now it’s more awesome with an Unsend feature… That’s right, you can recall your drunken hatemail and ill-advised stalkings of ex’s with one easy click… This might really be your chance to discharge your probation sentence with some dignity

This is quite funny. Start with a basic sentence and Wallacesterize in 10 easy steps. (Thanks, DM)

5. Paralell-o-rize your structure (turn one noun into two):

It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the choreography and the puppet work — his arms and fingers are perfect for the puppets — and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops and buckets moved out of frame.

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STOP HERE IF YOU ARE A MINIMALIST, WRITING COACH, OR JAMES WOOD
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6. Adjectival phrases: lots of them. (Note: apprx. 50% will include the word ‘little’):

It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet work — his little S-shaped arms and curved fingers are perfect for the standard big-headed political puppets — and it was, without question, his little square shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets moved out of frame.

You’ve never known raw, sexual energy until you’ve known it funnelled through the keytar of a woman born in Baltic region. (video after jump)

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The meeting in which Harry Potter was sold to publishers… But what about books after #3? (video after jump)

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George W Douche came to Canada recently, presumably to meet with our creationist science minister (yes, I’ve said this before: once Harper’s muzzles come off his ugly little pets, they’ll say the darndest things…), and said that he’d be writing about about his 12 hardest decisions while in office. As the guy on the Current said this morning, no word yet on whether it’ll be filed in bookstores under memoir, fiction, humour, or true crime. ZING!

As widely expected, former president George W. Bush, like many past occupants of the Oval Office, is writing a book. But rather than penning a more traditional presidential memoir, Mr. Bush plans to write about twelve difficult personal and political decisions he has made in his life.

Mr. Bush mentioned the book in his first speech since leaving office, delivered in Calgary, Canada on Tuesday. The book is to be published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of RandomHouse.

I ganked this from someone’s Twitter feed, but I don’t remember whose. I’m sorry, but I haven’t really adapted to Twitter’s bizarre convention of ADD sufferers to really be able to pay proper attention. Things just fly by and I’m like the wallflower at the party, smiling in the corner. Anyway, ten steps to save the paper.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the imminent death of the traditional newspaper. And with good reason. Over the last year or so several papers, both minor and major, have gone belly up. There are many reasons for this trend: More people are turning to the internet to get their news. The internet has opened the door for other outlets such as TV networks and online service providers like Google and Yahoo! to provide news. And more and more people are turning to blogs, social networks, discovery engines and other non-traditional sources to filter and supply the news they want when they want it.

Considering the way and pace at which the world is progressing, from cell phones with internet access to the plugged-in reality of both office and home life it’s no wonder then the trusted pile of thin paper that shows up on doorsteps throughout the world is starting to lose its foothold.

But does this mean the time of the traditional newspaper is over? Not by a long shot. It does however mean it is time the newspaper business starts looking at the way they do business and change their perception of themselves as a publishing house to a news provider.

Sony’s eReader is getting the Goog’s 500,000 titles. Wowza! And in further Kindle cringing news, Fujitsu has come out with the first colour e-reader. Drool, but gack at the rather unfortunate name, FLEPia, which sounds like a stomach disease.

Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired.

The books available to Reader owners were written before 1923 and include classics like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” by Mark Twain, and “The Awakening,” by Kate Chopin, as well as harder-to-find titles like “The Letters of Jane Austen.”

“We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, and our partnership with Google is another step in that direction,” said Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business division of Sony Electronics. “We would love to continue working with Google to see how we can get more content for Reader owners.”

The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

I’d say the financial terms likely have something to do with the suffix “zillion”.

Virtual book clubs based on glimpses of book props in TV shows. … … Whatever works. I suppose this is the best that can be hoped for with TV. A decent plot and some product placement.

There’s no hidden agenda or mission to raise the literary IQ of viewers, at least not over at ABC, where “Lost” executive producers and writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse insist they are not trying to force literature down people’s throats.

“It’s really more about the fact that we’ve been influenced by literature in the way we’ve shaped the show, and it’s a nod to that process,” said Lindelof, who is also co-creator. “We pick the books with a great deal of meticulous thought and specificity and talk about what the thematic implications of picking a certain book are, why we’re using it in the scene and what we want the audience to deduce from that choice.”

What always amazes me over at Lost (the only show I watch, though I watch it with a religious quiver of glee… and don’t tell me it’s getting too complicated—it’s just nearing the point of getting complicated enough!) is not the books as props, but the literary references dropped in the dialogue and in things like character and place names. I’m always amazed at how overt it is, but no one seems to notice. I had this little chuckle at “Jeremy Bentham”, but it seemed to take most viewers by surprise when it was announced that it was a philosopher’s name. Um, you mean like every other character on the show?

Lead in kids’ books not really a threat (lead in kids’ guns on the other hand…)

Luminato festival in Toronto will bring some heavyweights, including Gaiman

Sherlock Holmes with zits and a cracked voice, “EleMENtary my dude, WatSON!!”

SUNY to preserve important poetry recordings

Faber backlist to be illustrated and reissued…

There’s a bunch of awards news floating around this time of year, like detritus and assorted crap in the uncovered pool of literature. Here I’ve used the net to scoop some of it together. I dread going over to look at the filter.

NYT sum up of some recent awards news

American National Magazine Awards

Young lion named (note: not Simba)

Atlantic book awards has split and become Atlantic Ink

Seamus Heaney says, T’row it on the pile, lads…

Some more international Booker bits here

The Booker’s International wing has one Canadian on it: Alice Munro. Ever heard of her? The rest are here. And below…

Peter Carey (Australia)

Evan S. Connell (USA)

Mahasweta Devi (India)

E.L. Doctorow (USA)

James Kelman (UK)

Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)

Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)

Alice Munro (Canada)

V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)

Joyce Carol Oates (USA)

Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)

Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)

Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)

Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

As reader Paul says, this is the best thing you’ll see all day. For me, it’s been all week.

Discovery (yes, the Discovery channel people) is suing Amazon over the e-reader technology that Kindle uses, saying it violates their patent. It’s like watching two big kids fight in the playground. There might even be stitches at the end of this one.

Discovery is best known for its channel on cable television, and is not seen as an Amazon competitor. But Discovery and Hendricks have been “significant players in the development of digital content and delivery services in the 1990s,” the company said in a statement.

“Hendricks’ work included inventions of a secure, encrypted system for the selection, transmission and sale of electronic books.” He filed for a patent in 1999.

A Discovery spokesman said the company has not developed e-reader technology using the patent. In the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, Discovery is seeking compensation from Amazon for using the patent, not an injunction to prevent it from selling Kindle.

Libraries bullied by budget bumps in Boston

Same in Brooklyn

British Library “mislays” 9,000 books… Oopsie!

Libraries boom on Prairies in bust

Magazines aren’t dying, according to this Slate business article. It’s just the ones that deserve to sink that are going under.

Publishers don’t just look to new titles to grow their business. They also seek to leverage existing titles into new categories. Now, with advertising spending on the skids, spinoffs are another major casualty of the magazine pullback. Of the 27 magazines on Ad Age’s list, roughly one-quarter of the abandoned titles were brand extensions. In the past year, Condé Nast killed Men’s Vogue as a stand-alone title, and plans for Vogue Living have been put on ice. Time Inc. pulled the plug on SI Latino, while Hearst yanked O at Home and Cosmo Girl. Last Friday, Jann Wenner’s Wenner Media announced it was delaying the launch of a quarterly fashion magazine, Us Style.

Largely, these magazines never caught on with readers. And it’s not surprising. Magazines are emotional products. They are objects of aspiration, passion, and desire. No one needs to read magazines, but millions of readers still subscribe to their favorite titles because they harbor deep connections to the glossy pages. As one veteran editor once explained to me, the best magazines make you feel like tearing open the plastic wrap the second that they arrive in your mailbox and curling up on the couch with them, ignoring whatever plans you had for the evening.

Which is why the current downturn can be good for publishers. Magazines still offer an unsurpassed ability to marry literary ambitions with deep reporting, photography, and visual design. In this new media age, people talk about the importance of transforming readers into “communities.” Magazines have never had a community problem. Great magazines have built enduring relationships with their readers that Facebook and Tumblr still aspire to. But in a race to grow their businesses, publishers put advertising first and editorial excellence second.

A Dutch company is proposing getting rid of sales reps to save money. I think the book business as a whole could be streamlined if instead of authors, editors, publishers, and readers, we just programmed a whole bunch of e-tools to automate the entire process. Then entire cycles of books could be written an read in microseconds and we could rest easy knowing that we’d not only saved buckets of cash, but that we’d also saved literature from the black hole of public indifference. And we’d also never have to read another “death of the…” article again.

The Netherlands’ largest bookselling chain has recommended cutting out sales representatives in favour of using an “e-rep” system. Speaking at last week’s APSBG Conference, Jesse Kroger, marketing manager of Boekhandels Groep Nederland, said by implementing a digital approach instead of face-to-face meetings, booksellers could become a more efficient and profitable businesses.

“I want to replace the rep with the e-rep – this will facilitate the process for buyers to get information in a more structured way,” said Kroger, describing the current system of sending out catalogues as “very outdated”. In particular, he singled out BGN’s recent move towards a more digital approach, which helped turn the company around from having lost €6.9m in 2001 to a profit-making company seven years later.

Author serializes book through Twitter—I imagine this would be the literary equivalent of a strobe light… I may have a seizure

10 Literary one-hit wonders

America’s got it’s fair share of nutbar far-right celebrities (one’s a drug addict, another’s a self-hating “woman”, etc.) but this is a new cake-taker: Bill O’Reilly reading aloud in an audiobook version of his sleezy porn novel before he became Fox’s loudmouthed champion of family values

Orange Prize longlist announced (includes Miriam Towes) Some analysis here

Derek Walcott throws his hat in the ring for the Oxford poetry chair

Diablo/Starcraft short story contest—no shit! Dudes, you might actually get someone to read your prose this way…

Ze Fraunch, zey love ze Prooost…

But is it really REALLY Shakespeare?

Speaking of which… six new Bardly works found?

Philosophy book pulped because of erroneous line about Hitch

More on lead in children’s books (does the act of reading perhaps replace any IQ points lost to the lead?)

Ninja K has a story up on Joyland, and she’s got a book launch coming up (on April 15 at This is Not a Reading Series at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto) for her fantastic new novel, Perfecting. I just got my copy yesterday and I’m thrilled. It’s a lovely thing. Go buy one right now! (In lesser news, somebody likes me.)

I had a wicked deadline to meet. Yes, I do have a life outside this little cage. Regular posting will resume tomorrow. But until then, I give you this… thing… in which John Travolta’s greasy younger brother shakes his money maker… FOR GOD!. If you don’t die of embarrassment and click away before 1:53, you’ll be rewarded with something that will just unhinge your jaw. (Thanks to Dana for the reminder) (Video after the jump)

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The Giller jury has been announced: novelists Alistair MacLeod and Russell Banks, and historian Victoria Glendinning. I’m too numbed by year after year of the same thing to say much. I’ve seen them come and seen them go and they all pretty much look alike. This year there’s the difference of very few actual Canadians on the list, but what difference is that really going to make? My rival blogger, Stephen Beattie, a young firey chap who still has the power of indignant idealism on his side, however, has some commentary.

Recent conflict-of-interest controversies over the juries for two other Canadian literary prizes, the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Regional Commonwealth Prize, may have made Giller paterfamilias Jack Rabinovitch a tad gun-shy and prompted him to look beyond our borders for jurors who are untainted by the incestuous nature of the Canadian literary community.

But, if this is the case, why – oh, why – could the prize administrators not have settled on a more diversified group? One of the perennial complaints about the Giller – okay, one of my perennial complaints about the Giller – is that it cleaves to an outmoded vision of Canadian literature: the prize most often goes to a work of historical fiction, or to a work that is written in the kind of lyrical, poetic, flowery prose that seems to be the default mode for most CanLit. If it is true that when you pick a jury for a prize like this, you effectively pick the winner, then the dominance of lyrical, backward-looking books on the Giller shortlist for the past 15 years is explicable by the makeup of the various juries, which have predominantly featured writers who themselves create lyrical, backward-looking works of fiction.

Which books would fictional characters choose if they could shop in today’s bookstores? Guardian points to the PW piece on this. Fun game.

Would Huck Finn go for The Dangerous Book for Boys? is one suggestion. Clearly not: full as it is of catapults, conkers and derring-do, he’d write it – if he could be bothered to write, which he probably couldn’t. I’d say Huck would be sneaking Stephen Kings out of bookshops under his jumper, or getting into the Hardy Boys, or enjoying the rollicking adventures of Hal and Roger Hunt. Would he like the Choose Your Own Adventure series (a guilty pleasure of my own in days past)? I reckon he would.

The Post looks at the ebook revolution through their business pages. Ah, the nitty gritty of dollars and sense. This is where the magic happens. Where the rubber meets the road, you literary lolligaggers. Where the bacon meets the skillet. Where one skunk on the side of the highway meets another, settles down in a hole, has stank-assed babies and then gets smucked by the grill of a Corola, dies on the side of the highway and is eaten by crows who then fly to a wire over the truckstop parking lot and shit on said Corola in an instance of the universe’s unique brand of coincidental justice. It’s the juicy stuff of life here, folks.

Currently, the only dedicated e-book reading device for sale in Canada is the Sony Reader, which has two models retailing for $300 and an enhanced version with more memory that costs $400.

Since the Reader’s introduction into the Canadian market a little more than a year ago, its per-capita sales volume has outpaced that in the United States, said Candice Hayman, spokeswoman at Sony of Canada, but she could not give specific figures.

Still, the rise of e-books is not hurting Canadian book sales.

Sales have only become more robust heading into the recession, with book unit sales 6% higher in the last three months of 2008 than they were during the same time period in 2007, according to BookNet Canada, which tracks retail sales. In January, unit volumes jumped 10% year over year.

“It’s huge,” said spokeswoman Morgan Cowie. “We can’t really say why it is happening, all we can see is that it is obviously the case that people are still buying books.”

Alan Moore (aka Scary Jesus) profiled the Guardian

Gail Hareven (from Bookslut)

Dale Peck (ah, remember when we used to get Peck news? Good times…)

Eric Carle (Ninjlet #2 just ripped in half his Busy Little Spider board book today… I’ll have him up to phone books and in the circus by the time he’s 10)

When you think of the roots of English, don’t just think of the Romans, French, and Anglo-Saxons. Also think of me, your friendly neighbourhood painted savage.

“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” is by no means a complete chronicle of our language. McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, “the untold history of English.” He points out that English has what he calls “kinks” in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that “untold histories” have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter’s persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish.

The WSJ looks at HC’s new business models and finds the whole thing indebted to publishing’s favourite douchette, former HC employee Judith Regan. Do we need her special brand of sleeze in this industry? Perhaps.

Only two years ago, what seemed like the whole bookish world applauded Harper’s firing of Judith Regan; the firebrand editor was too crass, too vulgar, too independent to work inside the system — and perhaps worst of all, her books were gross, unseemly, politically incorrect.

Yes, yes, everybody acknowledged that they also made huge amounts of money for the parent company. Yes, in the year after she left, profits plummeted. But there was visceral, collective relief at her flame-out. BookLand would be returned, mercifully, to the gentler ethos it had long enjoyed.

Now, two years later, we’re may be witnessing Regan Redux, in the unlikely person of Neil Strauss. A thirtysomething onetime pop culture reporter for the New York Times, Strauss appears to be nothing like his muse. Except that he is a master of the kind of high-low books that were her hallmark.

They take St. Patrick’s Day pretty seriously here in Newfoundland (and by seriously I mean in a shamrock-and-green-hats kind of way) and so I have a holiday today. The Ninjlet is sleeping upstairs, but I only have as much posting time as he has lack of consciousness. So here goes.

Action comics #1 goes for ungodly sum to (statisically-likely) ungodly celebrity

Oxford prof accuses former student of intellectual theft

The periodic table of fonts (as always, for former love, Ninja Pete)

Espresso POD book machine gets some mainstream placement

Writer’s Festival row in Oz (glad it’s not just us always squabbling)

Audiobook narrator gets drunk around chapter 13

Russell Smith’s knickers twist over Amazon reader reviews

NBCC award winners announced, include Bolaño for fiction

BC Book Prizes shortlists revealed (ninja favs Henderson and Galloway herein)

Houghton Mifflin to keep trade division

Did you iron your toga or are you just happy to see me? Roman joke book discovered

Area Dad Botches Prince Bride Quote

France book sales up, despite economic merde-storm

RIP: James Purdy, author, dead at either 86 or 95

Agent Simonoff goes to William Morris (good, now he can finally concentrate on selling film rights to my last book of poems…)

I’m on the road again today, hopefully on time with things, as I head back to St. John’s. I spent seven hours yesterday in Pearson airport, slowly going crazy with boredom. I chronicled some of it on my Twitter feed, if you want to check it out… I’m feeling much better today after beers with friends last night.

Regular posting will resume Monday.

Hi Guys, if you’ve been following for a while you know I sit on the board for One Little Goat Theatre Company, an experimental group out of Toronto and New York. OLG explores the boundaries between poetry and theatre and has in the last couple years done some incredible shows that have had nearly perfect reviews: the radio plays of Yehuda Amichai, NA English language premier of Thomas Bernhardt’s Ritter, Dene, Voss, last year’s radical rewrite of Antigone as a post-9/11 commentary on war in the middle east. This year our first show is Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s “Someone is Going to Come” (a new translation by our artistic director). Here is NOW Magazine’s lead preview. It opens this weekend, which might already be sold out. I’d get my tickets now if, I were you.

David Kipen will eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if all of the 128 people in a small island town don’t read the book as part of America’s NEA-led Big Read. get your wallet out, Davy. Or pass the ketchup.

So far, according to local paper the Sandusky Register, 70 residents have pledged to read the book, but Kipen, an author and book critic, needs the remaining 58 to sign up, or he’ll be facing a nasty case of indigestion. If everyone living on the island reads To Kill a Mockingbird, and signs an affidavit promising they’ve done so, Kipen has said he’ll buy them all a pizza.

Kipen said he had long wanted to find a town “small enough and brave enough to accept the challenge of dragooning every last literate resident, without exception, into tackling its chosen book”, when Kelleys Island, a four square mile island in Lake Erie, was suggested to him. He didn’t say whether he’d be tackling the hardback or the paperback edition of the novel if he fails to convince the island to get reading.

Is it wrong to give a good review to a novel about an unrepentant, gay, incestophilic Nazi? Moreover, will any reviews, even hateful ones, affect the sales and infamy of this book?

Entertainment Weekly gave it a B–, saying, “It’s like Dante’s Inferno written by Reich historian William Shirer,” but complaining that its “graphic depravity lets us all off the hook.”

The San Francisco Chronicle advised, “If there is anyone in your Facebook friends list who doesn’t know about the crimes of the Nazis, give them this novel. The punishment fits the crime.”

At a time when many newspapers are reducing book coverage, The Kindly Ones tests how much reviews — pro or con — boost sales.

Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a digital newsletter, says it could be “the last time a publisher stakes a big bet on the belief that passionate reviews, including many negative ones, will drive sales while the author basically sits on the sidelines.”

The book is selling moderately well. It’s No. 237 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, which includes hardcovers and paperbacks. At Barnes & Noble, it’s among the 50 best-selling hardcover novels, doing best in New York, says the chain’s marketing chief, Bob Wietrak.

Canadian poet Blaser profiled around being famous everywhere but Canada.

In person, just like the Toronto writer said, there is something distinctly cool about this West Coast octogenarian.

It partly has to do with the way he doesn’t give a damn what others think of him.

There is also a welcoming and unpretentious quality about him. Not to mention a bluntness. He swears a fair amount and can say risque things.

But even as his memory occasionally plays tricks on him as a result of a mini-stroke several years ago, he is open, loving, funny, sensual, energetic and deeply philosophical, even mystical.

His no-pretence personality fits with the sage advice he gives to aspiring writers and poets: “Be very honest. Don’t get fancy before you’re fancy.”

His attic-like writing room is dominated by a life-sized statue of Pinocchio, which seems to illustrate his own character.

Pinocchio, Blaser said, is “the key to looking at the world — because he’s got a long nose and he’s a snoop and he’s got a sense of humour and he can get his hands on anybody.”

Let’s see: one on “uncertainty”, one on the “singularity”, two novels, four books of poems, one on “salt”, two manuscripts under review for the paper, a book of letters, the manuscripts of three friends, one manuscript being edited for a press… Should I count the ones I’m reading to the boy? Because he’s in the middle of three novels. I believe that works out to “umpteen”. The post I’m linking to is really just an excuse for me to ask you: how many books are you reading right now?

Harry Potter test screening leads to chucked tomatoes

US bookseller of the year

The rest of the Commonwealth prizes sees Tanya Lahiri taking the proverbial crowbar to the knees of Nancy Rushdie

Neuroscientists map intelligence in the brain (the longer I spend in this airport the closer mine comes to being a floorplan instead of a topographical map of the Andes)

Hey poet: are you as talented as a 4k computer? … and that computer-that-could went on to become the poet we know today as… [insert your favoured victim here]

A comic book of Sarah Palin’s life, which one would think ideally suited to the semantic root of the form, has met high demand. Disappointingly, this is not a mashup with her and Cathy taking on Wolverine and that blue guy from the Watchmen who can atomize things with his apathy. That I would pay to read.

Clive Cussler apparently lost a lawsuit against a film company that adapted his book because the company was able to show that he lied about his book’s sales figures and “duped” them into adapting it. Now he’s on the hook for almost $14M in damages. (From Moby)

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ordered Clive Cussler to pay $13.9 million in legal fees to the production company that turned his novel “Sahara” into a box-office flop.

In his ruling Monday, Judge John P. Shook agreed with lawyers for Crusader Entertainment that an original contract between the two parties called for an award of legal fees if either side breached.

“The issue boils down to whether the fees requested are reasonable and necessary,” Shook said. He concluded that they were.

So, you heard him, poets. No more saying you’ve sold 750 copies of your book. Or Hollywood will come knocking and pull your beating heart from your chest like Mola Ram and eat it in front of you like Kevin Costner.

I meant to post this yesterday, but it somehow slipped away. The book business is hurting and everyone’s talking about reduced money for everyone. Everyone that is except those the pubs are banking on for big returns. Sully is one example, but what about Audrey Niffenegger who just received a $5M advance on her second novel.

Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world.

After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in the United States this fall. The book is a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.

Speaking of time travel, six years back I was just starting Bookninja, so I probably missed Ms. Niffenegger’s rise to fame, but I still have to ask… Digguh-digguh-dig. Has the world gone frackin’ crazy, Buck?

It’s official. Over $3mil for two books. But is Old Iron Balls the Pilot, Sully Sullenberger, he of Hudson River landing and leader of post-apocalyptic rebel group in ruins of war torn American heartland, a poet? I think I’ve just fallen in love with an older man…

Yes, it’s official: The book world has gone crazy. Here we are, a few weeks after some of the darkest days in publishing—both in layoffs and in actual sales—and along comes the newly revamped HarperCollins imprint William Morrow to give more than $3 million to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the admittedly genius pilot who saved 155 lives by landing USAirways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January. Yes, Sully’s a bona fide hero, and after hearing his testimony in Washington about the conditions pilots work under, I believe a grateful nation owes him a big payday.

But wait: The crazy part is that the Sullenberger deal was for two books. The first will be a memoir, and the second is a collection of Sully’s inspirational poems. Who knew that next to the heart of a hero lurked the soul of a poet?

This is the kind of book deal a publisher makes in order both to make a balance sheet work—the $3.2 million goes down on two different lines, for two different titles, and thus each book “only” has to earn back half of the total—and also to humor a would-be author or, in this case, poet. (And make no mistake, if William Morrow had not signed up the second book, many other publishers would have, just to get Sully’s memoir.)

There’s some outrage that he’s getting over $3M for a deal that includes poetry, but let’s be honest, the cash is for the memoir and the lunch he was bought negotiating the deal was his advance for the poetry. Hey, it couldn’t be worse than this.

Endicott, whose meteoric rise to fame began here on Bookninja with an ad last year (ahem), has now hit the big time and is on her way to taking the kit of the Commonwealth’s entire kaboodle for her Freehand novel Good to a Fault. Go buy it!

I missed my connection to Ottawa by three minutes and am now stuck in Toronto’s Pearson for six hours. I’m missing the meeting I was travelling for and am ready to smash my face into a recycling bin over and over until I attain sweet sweet negative bliss. Worse than all this…? I’m stuck in terminal one. I’ve seen every one of the six shops three times and they continue to suck each time I return. Guess I’ll do some updates to pass the time. Razzen frazzen.

This is an interprative dance of my day. For those of you who haven’t already seen this, it does have a startling and happy ending. (Video after jump)

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Language programs in schools are being drastically cut back.

WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

In the latest Bookninja Magazine “podcast”, we look at Adam Sol’s third book of poems, Jeremiah, Ohio, a road novel in poems that features the doomed prophet Jeremiah and his sidekick, the bread-truck-driving, grad-school-dropout Bruce. Sol riffs on the Biblical Jeremiah to create a modern prophet who is as engaging as he is delusional; whose song is, in the words of the hapless Bruce, “warped music/something necessary and unique.”

Christine Fischer Guy catches up with Sol over coffee in Toronto to talk about tackling a novelist’s challenges in a book of poems, the lure of writing eccentric characters, and the necessity of prophets in the post-911 world.

The two most important positions in British poetry are set to be filled by women, and there’s an article at Slate asking whether women are undervalued as writers because of what they write and how they read.

Who decides which subjects matter; what voice is appropriate for what kind of story; what books get published, reviewed, read and reread, and enshrined as Literature with a capital L? Showalter takes her title from Susan Glaspell’s 1917 story “A Jury of Her Peers,” in which a sheriff and an attorney, at a loss to find a reason why a wife would murder her husband, overlook clues to his brutality and her desperation that their wives, rummaging around the farmhouse crime site, easily discover—and, sympathizing with the accused, destroy. Women, of course, could not sit on juries in 1917, or even vote; they were judged and governed by laws and codes and procedures they had had no hand in making or applying. In the same way, Showalter argues, for most of our history women writers lacked “a critical jury of their peers to discuss their work, to explicate its symbols and meanings, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to all readers.”

A woman could do very well in the popular marketplace, and many have—women were, and are, the major readers of novels and poetry, a source of much annoyance to male writers from Hawthorne’s day to our own—but men had a lock on prestige. They ran the elite magazines and publishing houses and gave out patronage. (If Emerson or Thomas Wentworth Higgins liked your poetry, you were in.) They wrote the important, serious, taste-making reviews. (Henry James, despite being Edith Wharton’s great friend, seems never to have missed a chance to savage a woman writer in print.) Most important for the long haul, they edited the histories and surveys of American literature that shaped the canon, and they made no bones about their preferences. In 1917, the four male editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature set out to “enlarge the spirit of American literary criticism and render it more energetic and masculine.” The Literary History of the United States, published in 1948, was edited by 54 men and one woman.

James Patterson is so good at delegating that he doesn’t even need his publisher to design his covers because they’ll just fuck it up. The man’s a machine. A MACHINE! A profile. (Sounds like he could give Bradbury’s publisher, in the post below, a lesson.)

After being rejected by 26 publishers, in 1977 Patterson’s first book, The Thomas Berryman Number, won the Edgar award, a prestigious prize for mystery fiction. The story of a hitman stalking the mayor of Nashville, it established him as a writer of tightly constructed stories although it was not a commercial success.

More books followed, but he did not feel confident enough to abandon his six-year run as company chairman until he scented certain success with Along Came a Spider in 1992, when he invented the character of Alex Cross.

Employing his ad-man skills, Patterson took control of the book’s design and marketing. He paid for television advertisements with his own money and redesigned the book’s cover: “They’d done a cover that had a kid’s sneaker with a little blood on it, and it didn’t do anything for me. I want the reaction to be ‘I want this!’ ” He bumped up the title to a size that had the desired effect: the story became a bestseller. His marketing techniques are now taught as a case study at Harvard business school.

Graham Swift’s papers go to British library, presumably to fish with papers of Ted Hughes

Harry Potter signed first ed. goes for $19,100 more than any reasonable person should have paid for it

Here come the boomers, just let them get their walkers first… Large print editions starting to fill out shelves

BoingBoing points to the a neat story of how stories get mixed, especially in the pocket-watches of Abraham Lincoln

Ray Bradbury’s latest brings some profiles… most of which find a way to mention that he now seems crazy and his fiction track record lately sucks… You know, everyone’s always comparing him to his masterpiece, Farenheit 451 (the temperature at which books burn)… I wonder how good his new work would look if you instead compared it to his earlier, foundational book Farenheit 151 (the temperature at which books mildew)

Are world-changing books light on readability? Is that why there are so many books about books that changed the world? A kind of vicarious learning? Anyway, now there’s a catalog of essays on 50 books that changed the world.

Boing Boing pointed to this vintage kids books blog that has some great looking titles, many of which I’ve never seen.

Whatever happened to the Dead Poets Society? College kids choose books little leeetel gerrls. College kids these days, I tells ya, only carin’ about werewolf and vampire schlock books instead of books about hairy beats and their bloodsucking hangers-on. (Come on, you can see how it explains a few things, can’t you?)

In 1969, when Alice Echols went to college, everybody she knew was reading “Soul on Ice,” Eldridge Cleaver’s new collection of essays. For Echols, who now teaches a course on the ’60s at the University of Southern California, that psychedelic time was filled with “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “The Golden Notebook,” the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Forty years later, on today’s college campuses, you’re more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin’s transgressive sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s modern gothic “Twilight” series. It’s as though somebody stole Abbie Hoffman’s book — and a whole generation of radical lit along with it.
…
Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Obama book leads British popular award list

Write much? Two new Bolaño novels (plus sixth section to 666) found among his papers after his death (I know this is how it happens to me…I think, gee, if I don’t put this somewhere safe I’ll probably forget about it and then, poof, suddenly I’ve lost two-plus novels, just like that)

Definitely Shakespeare: portrait of Bard confirmed (for some reason, this article is illustrated with a portrait other than the one being discussed… odd); and Willie’s original first theater dug up from ground

Facebook: for the creepy stalker you never meant to become


And speaking of hot, melty keyboard love…

And just to throw some wrenches into the works over at this post on religion where the comments have run the gammut from thoughtful essays to snide face slaps (but have largely stayed refreshingly friendly, if somewhat chiding): 13 things science can’t explain